Yesterday CNBC carried a very interesting piece on high peed rail-- and why the U.S. has fallen so woefully behind other nations. Jeniece Pettitt and Adam Isaak compared the U.S. to other countries: "China has the world's fastest and largest high-speed rail network-- more than 19,000 miles, the vast majority of which was built in the past decade. Japan's bullet trains can reach nearly 200 miles per hour and date to the 1960s. They have moved more than 9 billion people without a single passenger casualty. France began service of the high-speed TGV train in 1981 and the rest of Europe quickly followed... When the high speed rail between Madrid and Barcelona in Spain came into operation, air traffic just plummeted between those cities and everyone switched over to high speed rail which is very convenient. People were happy to do it; they weren't forced to switch. They did it because it was a nicer option to take high speed rail. There's sort of a rule of thumb for trips that are under three or four hours in trip length from city to city-- those usually end up with about 80 to 90 percent of the travel market... [Brian Annis, California Secretary of Transportation:] 'Where rail exists and it's convenient and high speed, it's very popular. America is waking up to this idea that rail is a good investment for transportation infrastructure.'"
But the U.S. has no true high-speed trains, aside from sections of Amtrak's Acela line in the Northeast Corridor. The Acela can reach 150 mph for only 34 miles of its 457-mile span. Its average speed between New York and Boston is about 65 mph.California's high-speed rail system is under construction, but whether it will ever get completed as intended is uncertain.
You'll get a better picture of which special interests are keeping high speed rail from moving forward in the U.S. by watching the film. But you can get the general idea here: "There are a lot of forces in America that really don't want to see rail become a major mode of transportation, especially because it will effect passengers numbers on airplanes; it'll effect the use of autos." Currently backward Republicans see high speed rail that socialist European countries but not something for car-loving America.
