High Speed Rail: What Our Nation Needs

7 Pages 1679 Words

Many of the nation’s transportation planners and experts agree that the United States is on the verge of a transportation crisis. The nation’s automobile and airline transportation systems, while very viable modes of travel, are already facing noticeable crises. The traffic congestion is showing up around the country’s cities and suburbs. Highway and airport construction is already far outpaced by demand and new construction creates evident problems. With the nation’s ever-growing population looking to travel inexpensively, safely, and comfortably, not many feasible options are given to transportation officials. However, there is one tried and true method that officials are frequently voicing their opinions in favor of, and that is revamping the nation’s neglected passenger rail systems. Many Americans are aware of Amtrak and its legacy of problems, and for all its and other passenger rail projects’ potential they have falling by the wayside in last half of the 20th century as popular forms of travel. Anthony Perl summed it up nicely with this statement, “Nowhere else in the industrial world was the passenger train’s rise in importance so meteoric, and nowhere else in the post-industrial world was this followed by steep decline” (Perl 1). Yet, the proposed railroads of today are not at all like its traditional stereotype. As Richard Worsnop explains in his research paper, “The sleek trains the planners envision are barely related to their smoke-belching forebears,” and are capable of transporting hundreds of passengers at speeds ranging from 125 to 300 mph. This innovative breed of transportation is known as High-Speed Rail (HSR). This “High Speed Rail” concept is increasingly seen as the savior for the nation’s overworked transportation infrastructure. So I, along with many others, believe that the integration of HSR into the transportation infrastructure is the only practicable solution for the nation’s t...