17th
Queue up but first pause the mental Monorail tune for just a minute.
Now enter Japan’s plans for a maglev train between Tokyo and Osaka. What’s already a fast bullet train trip would be reduced further to just over an hour - and the distance covered is farther than that between New York and Washington. But the Japanese have always been train happy, and they’re Japanese.
Americans can’t stomach the cost of high-speed rail by either the rest of the world’s actually-faster-than-cars definition or by the paltry Acela Express faster-than-slow-Amtrak-train definition. (Yet they always have appetite for wider highways, more complex toll road networks with sophisticated occupancy-presence detection, vehicle-miles-driven tracking, and tiered-price schemes.)
But if the Northeast corridor (or your favorite corridor for that matter) had the infrastructure for two-hour-or-less affordable trips between, say, Union and Penn stations, suddenly D.C. becomes the southern-most borough of New York and Phily becomes one of the inner ones. With really-high-speed rail, an intercity commute could be shorter than many a conventional single-occupancy-vehicle commute from ‘burb to city core. More importantly employers would have access to huge markets of talent, job seekers would likewise have more options, and commercial centers and tourism industries would welcome more out-of-towners as if they came from across the river.
That’s a lot of capital cost, but increasing accessibility especially in and between transit-oriented metropolitan areas will lead to much more long-term cost-effective environmentally-sustainable growth than (vainly?) trying to maintaining growth and mobility in areas where transportation was cheap in the days of $1/gallon gas.
