[Alberta's Child]

The author of this piece has made two points that directly conflict with each other. On one hand, he says that airline passengers are "furious" about delays and overcrowding, but on the other hand he offers no evidence to support his claim that his multi-modal transportation system will not have the same problems.

Let's face it -- highway congestion, overcrowded airports, and poor passenger rail service all have the same cause: people want to get from Point A to Point B, but none of them want to pay the true cost of getting from Point A to Point B. What makes transportation unique in engineering is that it is possible to provide mediocre, or even downright awful, infrastructure without incurring catastrophic results. Nobody in their right mind would knowingly work in a building that met only 75% of the building codes, yet everyone seems perfectly content to live with a transportation system that runs at no better then 75% of its needed capacity.

[caddie]

Ultimately, if even the rail right-of-ways are maximally developed, there may be congestion of all three main thoroughfares: rails, interstate highways, and the air.

But RIGHT NOW, we have the interstates and air near saturated, and we have almost complete lack of use of railroad right-of-ways around the country.

So, it seems logical, that, until EVERYTHING is saturated, we may get tremendous benefit from developing the rails.

After all, Publius is right, there was a huge interurban rail system up and running all over the United States prior to WW2.

Notice: We had thriving small towns then, with minimal metropolitan sprawl.

And cars were not essential for many persons.

My thesis is that the American pattern of huge cities, huge suburbs, nonexistent small towns, and everything spread out over everywhere, developed AS A CONSEQUENCE of the near-exclusive subsidy of the highway infrastructure and the airways, and the complete neglect of intra- or inter-urban rails' infrastructure.

The auto is king, as are jets, and small towns die with the rails.

I am not advocating the death of the car or of the interstate highway system. Or anything but continued development of the air traffic control system.

But we are overlooking a huge untapped resource in the already-existent rail right of way network that we have carved out all over the rocks and mountains of the United States.

It is a network that is capable of carrying twice as many person per hour as our interstate highway system, given the right development, capital, trains, and improvements.

No kidding.