America Needs High Speed Rail
High speed rail will make traveling faster and easier for the masses in America and boost the economy, by allowing people to do more things faster, encourage more people to move to America, and open up job and infrastructure opportunities with a more connected network.
America is a country with an unremitting love for cars, but we don’t need to get rid of cars in order to have better public transit. In fact, by converting more people to use public transit, we will make the driving experience for everyone by reducing the amount of traffic.
High speed rail can help bring people out of poverty
A big part of living costs is rent, and it is more expensive to live in more convenient locations, which are places with better public transit and better jobs. This is usually a city center or an area near the headquarters of some company. This means people who don’t have that much money have to live in the fringes of a region, and take an arduous commute just to get to work. For example, there are stories of people who live 2 hrs away from DC or NYC, because the housing costs are one-third of the cost in a place that is 30 minutes away, and that’s a tradeoff they are willing to make. Because people are constantly stuck in this tradeoff of needing to save money to pay rent, and living far away, it limits their career mobility, and many of their potentially productive hours are spent riding public transit instead.
With high speed rail, not only do people have their commute reduced drastically, but they will have more options for places to live, which will create more supply for housing that fits the needs of people, and give people a larger range of flexibility for where they live. In addition, by giving people the option to still live cheaper and spend less time traveling, they will have more time and be able to spend it on other things, such as a side gig to generate money for their family. Not only are people more productive, but we open up more real estate opportunities for development.
Given these benefits, why don’t we have public transit? In short, because the government is stupid, but they aren’t all to blame, there are other players as well. There’s lots of corruption and stupid bureacracy procedures that make it hard to build public transit in general, let alone high speed rail. For example, private property laws make it very hard for people to have to give up their land to the government, so the government usually has to work very hard just to get the land rights to build public infrastructure. This is dumb, because the govt technically has the power to build these infra improvements if they try hard enough — people are just not forcing the issue enough.
There are also lots of lobbyists, mostly from the richer end, who are opposed to it because they have stakes in oil or the automobile industry. For example, the Koch brothers, who are two of the wealthiest people in America, have a large stake in oil and would not want to see the demand of oil go down if there are less people driving in cars. Therefore, they have expended a lot of money to lobby and make sure politicians don’t pass any laws to help public transportation. How pathetic is that, trying to make most people’s lives harder just for their own benefit. Their rationale is apparently that “Uber and personalized transit is the future.” What a load of junk! Public transit is way more efficient space-wise, environmental, and time-wise than personal driving, and besides that, most people can’t afford ubers everywhere. In addition, ubers will strain the current infrastructure for cars and cause way more traffic. We need public transit.
Public transit would make it more convenient to visit places, do more things with their life, and reduce the risks of car accidents.
Car accidents cause the most deaths out of any transportation, and are notoriously known for having lots of accidents, whether it’s human error or mother nature taking the wheel. Trains would be much more safe, and also enable people to pursue different careers. I used to have a friend whose dad worked in a college university that was an 8 hour drive from home, and would visit every weekend. That he did…until one day he died tragically in a car accident on the way back home. This would be prevented if we had high speed rail, which would have allowed him to commute home via train instead of having to drive all the time.
Think about long distance relationships as well. There could be more relationships this way as well if we didn’t have to pay the price of flying all the time or driving just to see people. High speed rail would make our country more connected, foster more relationships and just enable people to do more things since they have better access to places they can go. Networking would be so much easier to do in person, as traveling would be so much more convenient as well, and people will feel much more connected if traveling is more convenient.
SF is a classic example of a city that is poorly connected by public transit, is rampant with traffic, and is known for being horrible to navigate because you essentially need a car to get anywhere, even in the city. Even with a car, you’re probably going to get robbed. Terrible city. But I digress — having a lack of public transit means that most people in SF without cars have to walk everywhere, to the point where making 45 minutes walks is reasonable, since if you take the MUNI, the local bus, you might spend about the same time. What a joke for the supposed “tech mecca” of America.
The SF to LA railroad doesn’t exist, even though it should, and has been highly demanded for many years. The drive takes 5 hours, which almost breaks even with a plane if you add getting to the airport and going through security, but you have to drive, which, again, is a very high risk activity, as accidents are very common. It doesn’t help that Route 5 is two lanes for most of it, with tons of truckers, and the scenic route is not feasible for travel as it is windy and is around a 12 hours drive. There were, and are currently lots of plans to build this railroad, but the government is pricing the project extremely high, and are being unreasonably slow about progress on it. There are also reportedly private property rights that are hard to obtain, but I doubt there are serious efforts to push this project.
I dream about high speed rail in America everyday, and just pray that it will happen. But then, I remember that most people don’t want things done until it directly affects them and it is heavily needed. The current state of American public transit is that it works, so people aren’t bothering to improve it, and the people sitting in Congress don’t care enough about the public they are supposedly representing. Until a miracle change of plans from the higher ups in Congress decide that Americans need high speed rail, we’ll be stuck driving everywhere, clogging up the streets, and polluting our dear Earth.