Progress Illinois does a rather good job demolishing the main ‘points’ of the Daily Herald’s rather ill-informed whining about high speed rail. But one point stood out at me:
The Herald goes on to suggest that Quinn and Durbin instead devote their energy to securing resources for flood control and pothole repairs, problems they consider “immediate and visible.” But in advocating for their own pet projects, the editorial board displays their ignorance about the stimulus bill.
You know the best flood control? Stop building and rebuilding in flood plains.
Of course, Adam leaves out a tremendously important point about the development of high speed rail. Currently passenger rail in the Midwest is terribly unreliable because it has to share corridors with freight trains that have the right of way on tracks. So quite often it isn’t a 5 1/2 hour train ride from Chicago to Saint Louis–it’s often up to 8 hours if the schedule gets just a little out of whack. High speed rail would have precedence on the new tracks and wouldn’t be delayed for long periods of time.
Additionally, the 4 hour estimate is at the high end of the new corridor and ignores several other factors. Rail also makes it far easer to travel to destinations not in the actual two cities and getting it under 4 hours also hits the time it takes to realistically fly by the time you deal with security and other issues with flying and flying doesn’t generally get you into the central city.
Overall high speed rail is far more efficient in moving people than is air travel or medium distances. Add routes to Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Des Moines and perhaps Madisan and Minneapolis and you dramatically improve the transportation infrastructure for the midwest and are an incredible economic development tool for the cities not at the hubs.
The freight traffic coming in the other direction is terrible.
That we don’t have a decent (and by that I mean, TGV-style) railway is a disgrace. Maybe people would probably worry less about pot-holes if they actually had the option to go by rail.
It’s about time we started getting serious about being modern and up-to-date. I never knew second-rate and second-class was part of the American Dream — yet we’ve got it in transportation, bandwidth and health-care, just to name a few.
The Herald is simply whining that more money isn’t being spent on suburban roads, and specifically the roads in ITS suburbs, which is just more of the same “Gimme mine and screw everyone else” sectionalism that’s hobbled Illinois from the beginning.
Incremental improvements toward true high-speed rail will benefit everyone, even the Herald’s suburbs. Wherever high-speed rail has been built between cities of the Chicago-St. Louis, or Chicago-Twin Cities distances, it captures the majority of travelers in those corridors from airlines. Which, in this case, Suburbs, would mean fewer flights at O’Hare.
More importantly why not rail from O’Hare to Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field? Short hop flights take a lot of time and fuel. There are tracks just outside of both O’Hare and Mitchell. Why not O’Hare to Rockford and Midway?
It could cut a lot of O’Hare flights and save a lot of energy. It might even make some of the O’Hare expansion unnecessary…but then I have answered my own question.