Goodbye Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Hello, Luxury Bus?
by Richard Sennett
The next five years are going to be a hell of a ride. All of the world’s airlines are going to be merged into a giant mega-corporation headquartered in Germany. Most of the world’s passenger rail systems are going out of business. There are fewer cars on the road than there ever have been. And the US will have the most highly developed high-speed inter-city high-speed rail network in the world and is spending around $1 trillion on it over the next 25 years.
The US is going to lead the way with the creation of a high-speed, high-capacity inter-city high-speed network, so that by 2020 every major city will have a high-speed direct-rail link to a major metropolis in the next six months. There will be no more car traffic around the city. And just in case you thought that this was just a dream, consider that the US in 2015 exported $60 billion in high-speed train cars and components that it used to build the high-speed network.
For more than 50 years, the US has been building a fast train network around the country. The US has built a network of high-speed train lines and today the country is a world leader in high-speed rail. There are about 18 high-speed mainline rail lines across the country. The country’s high-speed rail network is growing at an annual rate of about 4-5% and in 2015 made up almost a full third of total passenger revenues. Just last month, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (NRPC) named high-speed rail as the number one network investment in North America.
But for many cities and regions across the United States, high-speed rail is not a good fit. There are no high-speed rail lines in most of the country’s most densely populated cities. And despite being the fastest growing market for car freight by far in the United States, urban population density means that there are less than a handful of large cities with high-speed rail services.
In the last five years, New York has been the most aggressive of these cities in pushing for high-speed rail connections, but in the end the State’s funding
