The U.S. has always lagged behind countries in Europe and Asia in rail transportation service. While Japan was building its bullet trains in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. focused on its gas-guzzling interstate system, and the two nations’ transportation trajectories continued from there. Today, Amtrak’s woefully old and congested infrastructure ensures that even its high-speed Acela service in the Northeast crawls at average speed about 70 to 80 mph—not the 150 mph it’s capable of (the U.S. DOT defines high-speed as above 125 mph). The California project, which began being formally planned back in 1996 and was approved in a state ballot measure in 2008, has been mired in over a decade of lawsuits and debates ongoing to this day over how to fund its $68 billion construction. Let’s give California the benefit of the doubt and say the project will be completed on schedule 15 years from now. The sad thing is that the whole thing already looks incredibly outdated compared to newer, more advanced, and more efficient systems being built and planned around the world. Already, in China, Japan and Germany, the fastest trains exceed 300 mph, with Japan testing its new 311 mph maglev train service in November. And in 2017, China is supposed to complete a 1,390-mile route connecting Beijing and Hong Kong, which with just the Beijing to Guangzhou portion, already is running as the longest high-speed rail line in the world. Even Saudi Arabia and Turkey are well along the way to completing their own high-speed service. And the cheapest high-speed rail ticket? That goes to France’s budget rail-line Ouigo, launched in 2013, that runs from Paris to Southeastern France for as little as 10 euros.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:12:08 +0000
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