WHICH DO YOU PREFER?
For the past fifty or so years, inter-city transportation in America has remained the same. If you want to go to New York, say, but you live in Chicago, you have two options: pay dearly for a round-trip flight, or hop in the car and drive there on the interstate. However, flights are expensive and environmentally harmful, and the outdated highway system is faced with a plethora of dilemmas. Highways are costly, high-maintenance, slow, environmentally destructive, and dangerous. Most interstates, originally constructed in the 1950's, just were not designed for the volume of traffic they now hold. In consequence, highways are inefficient in handling traffic, and a tiny fender-bender can cause backups that stretch for miles. If these problems aren't enough, highways cost Americans billions of dollars every year--money that is going straight to unstable countries in the Middle East. Obviously some change needs to happen.
France, the wonderful, innovative, and civilized country that many conservatives so despise, has the solution. So do many other European countries. In fact, they've had the solution for decades (since 1976, in fact). We brought our highway system from Europe; why can't we borrow another transportation revolution?
This solution is the high-speed electric train, or TGV (Tres Grand Vitesse). The TGV, invented in France, services most major French cities from Paris. The TGV has been tested to go 357 miles per hour, and operates normally at 200, making all trips no longer than an hour or two. And since the TGV is electric, and France uses nuclear powerplants, the zero-emissions TGV is completely independent of fossil fuels. All of this while carrying 400-800 people.
Imagine the future of American transport with the TGV. A trip from Chicago to New York would take only three and a half hours- less time than an airplane when check-in is considered, and certainly less time than in a car. Would-be drivers would escape fatigue from long-distance driving, lessening the number of accidents on the roads. Trains could even run overnight- you could go to bed in a sleeper compartment in Louisville one night and wake up the next morning in Las Vegas.
If the government decreased highway size and used maintenance money to establish a TGV system, this would be possible. Low train fares (imagine LA to Kansas City for $4) and in-train advertising could pay for the system and create revenue for the government. Nuclear powerstations, equipped with the already-available "fuel rod re-enriching" technology, would wean America from oil and create the ultimate clean, replenishable power.
What are we waiting for?
