With the exception of those who live in and rarely leave small remote rural communities, we have all been through this nightmare…………………….You have a tight schedule and a limited amount of time to reach your destination and you end up stuck unable to continue your journey. Your plane is delayed or your flight has been canceled, you are stuck in traffic either because it just happens to be rush hour or the road is blocked due to a serious accident. Even with our passenger trains which are relatively reliable getting you from point A to point B, delays for freight trains or due to poorly maintained tracks and equipment are unfortunately not that uncommon.
I am not that experienced as a traveler, I have driven over much of the U.S. but other than Canada and a very small amount of Mexico I have not been in very many foreign countries. The stories that people I know have related about traveling in places like Europe, the Far East, and nations like Japan is that they are amazed at the ease and sophistication of the trains in those nations. Extremely modern, well run, and amazingly fast. I have heard from a number of friends who commented that to return to the U.S. and try to use the rail system here was incredibly disappointing and frustrating.
I think it’s a very poorly held secret why in comparison to many of the highly advanced nations of the world our development and investment into modern high speed rail systems more closely resembles that of an impoverished third world nation, than the major technological super power that we are. It’s really not that complex why we are at this point. As we started to invest in and develop our infrastructure after World War II, the airlines and the automotive industries saw the move to improve the speed and quality of trains as a form of public transportation a threat to their rapidly expanding markets and potential profits. We as a nation had our future decided for us by the commercial interests of certain elements of big business. Unfortunately, but fairly common in the U.S., the arc of our potential for what we might have achieved or what we may have become was basically torpedoed to keep massive profits for powerful established corporations as high as possible.
Much of the rest of the world has moved on. As we see the constant struggles of airline companies with scheduling and overbooking and the constant demand for public dollars to maintain and constantly expanding airports it’s clear that the idea of cheap and readily available flights that will take you whenever and wherever you what to go is a bit of a fantasy. You only need to look at the increasingly poor treatment of passengers to see the glaring flaws in this business model. Cars face much the same problem, there is a finite amount of space to accommodate additional cars on our roadways and of course the constant uncertainty of just how far the world will get on internal combustion engines and if we can survive the damage they do before we can change to something less destructive. Nations with a more focused picture of the future and how to adapt to it have decided that a great deal of what both planes and cars can do high speed trains can do much better and at the same time trains provide solutions for the very problems that our other common forms of transportation are creating.
Why we have turned our backs as a nation on this very promising and now well proven solution to our need to transport ourselves in our increasingly dense urban environments no longer makes any sense. As we continue to drag our feet nations all across the globe are making massive strides by constantly innovating and implementing the newest and best designs for high speed rail systems.
This is becoming a huge national problem for us but one we can still dig our way out of if we dare to adopt a more forward looking and holistic viewpoint. At some point we need to understand that frequently it has to be what the nation needs and what it’s citizens need and we need to stop worrying constantly about if corporations are every year increasing their profit margins by huge amounts from the previous year. If we don’t it won’t be long before this entire nation is completely run by corporations solely for the benefit of those companies top shareholders and the CEO’s who run them.
This issue with why we lag so far behind the rest of the world with regards to the development of high speed trains is a clear example of what happens when the needs of corporations become the only concern of our legislators and how they start to ignore issues that are necessary to the very survival of this nation.
This video does a pretty good job of explaining what’s at stake and why we are not addressing this problem. Unfortunately one of our two primary political parties seems to be doing whatever they can to put roadblocks in front of this much needed technology I suppose we could start by asking them why and who’s interest they serve by blocking this much needed improvement in our infrastructure. If nothing else I enjoy watching them squirm when they have to answer tough questions about why they oppose common sense solutions. And as a side note how about we start asking some of the billionaires in this nation to step up and help out the country that allowed them to have the opportunities that they received that allowed them to become so wealthy.