Commentary—

High Speed Rail Is Slowing

By William A. Collins

Flying’s such

An awful pain;

Sure do wish,

We had a train.

When I was little, my folks didn’t have a car. We took the bus or the train. Or walked. Or more likely, didn’t go. Earlier my grandfather had run a little railroad in upstate New York. Now it’s a bike trail. My former wife’s childhood home had one railroad in the front, another in the back. Not now. Life changes.

Why? Dwight Eisenhower got us to put our transport money into highways, for defense he said, and the auto industry took it from there. Not only is the interstate the way we get around now, but the industries that live off it dominate Congress and the state legislatures. Nor will we, the drivers, stand for any fudging on the quality of our favorite roads.

So who is left to lobby for high speed rail? Not the airlines — they’ve already lost (a little) business along the Northeast Corridor where some of us at least enjoy a pretense of speedy service. Not the trucking companies — they don’t want any transportation money that could otherwise maintain and improve highways drained off to build up trains. Not car drivers — they don’t want to pay higher gas taxes or tolls just so some elite snobs can ride a train. And certainly not legislators — they’re measured by the quality of the roads in their district.

Luckily there is one set of champions left to promote rail transit — the sheiks. Every time they raise the price of oil, more travelers try the train, more companies give their employees commuter tickets, and more governors appoint a mass transit task force. Mayors too have picked up the ball. Light rail and heavy rail alike have both crawled out from the core of many cities. New York is even adding a new subway line. Eureka!

But intertown train travel is all but derailed. There’s no constituency. It’s not like Europe or Japan. Our cities are too far apart and it’s quicker to fly, even if we do have to take our shoes off. Plus there’s not enough traffic on any one route to justify the cost of construction. OK, maybe San Francisco to LA. But Toledo to Cleveland? Maybe not.

One blessed advantage that low-speed transit advocates do still have is that trains used to run everywhere. Yes, some rights-of-way have been broken up and sold off, but many more remain intact. Hartford-New Britain is planning a high speed connecting bus line along one of them (and has been planning it for decades), and countless more routes lurk under a light coat of asphalt disguised as Rails-to-Trails. Ready if needed. Probably my grandfather’s beloved Fonda, Johnstown, and Gloversville RR won’t be one of the needed, but it’s there.

Still, it’s surely useful to have all those ancient routes available for extending commuter lines. But part of the problem is that commuters have started commuting in the other direction. Many employers, as fed up as anyone with the stresses of traffic, have packed it in with cities. They’ve moved to the ‘burbs and told their workers to drive. Plenty of free parking. Property tax-hungry towns have been eager to oblige. Bye-bye transit.

And so the great rush to rail may be something of a mirage. Nice in theory and the dream world, but hard to pull off in practice. Of course we should never underestimate the muscle of a spike in the price of oil, but somewhere there needs to be a regiment of special interests and politicians ready to put their shoulders to the transit wheel. Instead we seem to have a lot of what could pass for lip service, including from the President.

All of which is a shame. I love trains and have ridden some lulus, but to get them back we’ll need folks who stand to make a bundle off them. Don’t hold your breath.

 

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)