Third World America - Arianna Huffington [39]
AMERICA’S TRAINS GO OFF THE RAILS
America’s railway system is speeding down the tracks … in reverse.54 It’s one of the few technologies that has actually regressed over the past eighty years.
Tom Vanderbilt of Slate.com came across some pre–World War II train timetables and made a startling discovery: Many train rides in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s took less time than those journeys would today. For instance, in 1934, the Burlington Zephyr would get you from Chicago to Denver in around thirteen hours. The same trip takes eighteen hours today. “The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s,” Vanderbilt writes, “took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours.”
At the moment, the only high-speed train in the United States is Amtrak’s Acela, which travels the Washington–New York–Boston line.55 And I use the term “high-speed” very loosely. While in theory the trains have a peak speed of 150 miles per hour, the average speed on the Northeast Acela route is just 71 miles per hour, with its trains frequently stuck behind slower-moving ones on the heavily traveled tracks.56 Meanwhile, countries such as Japan, France, and Italy all have reliable train services that surpass 200 miles per hour.57 Same with China. For example, the six-hundred-mile ride between Wuhan and Guangzhou is completed in three hours by bullet trains reaching 217 miles per hour; the airport rail link in Shanghai reaches a top speed of 268 miles per hour.58
The stimulus bill included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects in thirty states, linking cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago—$1.25 billion going to a high-speed rail corridor between Orlando and Tampa.59, 60 Of course, high-speed rail systems everywhere would be great, but there are obvious political considerations behind sprinkling the money all over the country.61 The fact is, the highest trafficked section of the nation’s rail system, the limping northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C., is in dire need of renovation but received only $112 million.
So while this new investment is a start, it’s only a drop in the bucket.62 And while trains going over 200 miles per hour would be great, as Vanderbilt puts it, “We would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.”
TROUBLED BRIDGES OVER WATER
Out-of-date, overpriced, slow-moving, rickety, and routinely late trains can be frustrating and inconvenient. Out-of-date bridges can be downright deadly—as we’ve seen in the past decade with high-profile bridge collapses in Minnesota and Oklahoma.
According to the Department of Transportation, one in four of America’s bridges is either “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.”63 The numbers are even worse when it comes to bridges in urban areas, where one in three bridges is deficient (no small matter given the higher levels of passenger and freight traffic in our nation’s cities).
The problem is pretty basic: The average bridge in our country has a lifespan of fifty years and is now forty-three years old.64 We’d need to invest $850 billion over the next fifty years to get all of America’s bridges into good shape. That’s $17 billion a year. At the moment, we’re spending only $10.5 billion a year.
As a result, we all too often find our attention drawn to places such as Webbers Falls, Oklahoma.
It was May 2002, and Webbers Falls, 140 miles east of Oklahoma City, had been pounded by heavy rains.65 But that didn’t deter people from driving across Interstate