Voice of Reason: Rail system would work well in U.S.
Imagine: You want to take a day trip to Nashville. But instead of hopping in the car, driving down the highway and then the Interstate, you instead drive to McMinnville Station in Depot Bottom.
Here you board a smooth, quiet, high-speed train that in less than an hour has you in downtown Nashville. From Nashville’s Central Station you can board any number of light rail or subway lines which extend into various points in the city, including Vanderbilt/West End, the airport, 2nd Ave., The Coliseum, Hickory Hollow, Cool Springs and so on.
No fighting traffic and losing your patience on the Interstate. No paying exorbitant parking fees downtown. No wear and tear on your car. No paying increasingly high gas prices. No polluting the environment.
A fantasy? Here in rural American, yes. But it could be a reality. It already is in some areas of the country and it should be everywhere.
I had the pleasure of experiencing such mass transit system here in the U.S. several years ago. Driving up the East Coast, a friend and I stopped for the night in Dedham, Mass., a Boston suburb about 12 miles west of the city. For a couple of bucks each we were able to catch an Amtrak commuter train into the city center, where we connected to the city’s subway system we used to traverse seemingly the entire city.
Such a rail network is common in the Northeast, particularly in and around the Washington, New York and Boston metropolitan areas. For millions of people, this system is a true blessing, benefiting commuters, day trippers and travelers alike. For most of the rest of us, however, local access to rail travel might as well not even exist.
To see how well an extensive U.S.-sized rail network could work, one need look no farther than Europe. Literally, the whole of Western Europe, and a great portion of Eastern Europe too, is crisscrossed with rail lines, many of them high speed. Nearly every town of any consequence, including those the size of McMinnville, has a train station.
For Europe, of course, mass transit is almost a necessity. With a relatively dense population, sky-high gasoline taxes and stringent environmental controls, cars are more of a luxury than here in the U.S. There are still plenty cars, however, but train travel is a major mode of transportation and is highly popular with all segments of society.
Both this year and last my girlfriend and I have had the opportunity to travel to Europe. While there we used nothing but mass transportation, both for shorter trips within a single country and longer multi-country trips.
I was most impressed with the Eurostar, or Chunnel train. Hitting 186 mph, the Eurostar travels between the center of London and the center of Paris in just two hours and 35 minutes. From Paris one can connect to any point in Europe at similarly impressive speeds. Compared to this kind of operation, Amtrak looks more like the trains one finds at amusement parks.
To get a rail network like Europe’s here in the United States would require a government investment of billions of dollars, which itself would require a massive commitment on the part of the American public. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Like most peoples the world over, we will rarely do anything beneficial for ourselves until we absolutely must. In the case of building an extensive, high-speed rail network spanning the entire country, I’d say it will first take a greater destruction of our environment and the disappearance of cheap gas.
Without a doubt, we Americans have a love affair with our automobiles and we won’t lessen our dependence on them until we have no other choice, even if it kills us and our planet in the process.
Will Stewart is a reporter for the Standard who can be reached at 473-2191.