Ready for Departure?

A few weeks ago, a friend forwarded me an article about a $300 million passenger rail project underway that is designed to relieve traffic congestion, ease the impact of high oil prices and provide thousands of jobs. Guess where. If you said China or India, no cigarro. (If you said the United States, minus five cigarros.) Nope, it's Jamaica, a country with a per capita GDP (PPP) of just $7,700. The government is set to build new tracks, along with 18 new train stations across the country over the course of three years (with help from China, btw). Though the end product in Jamaica will not approach the size or efficiency of the high-speed rail systems of Europe or Japan, the project demonstrates a degree of foresight and initiative regarding modern transportation that has been discouragingly absent in the United States. Our current answer to the French TGV is Amtrak's Acela Express from D.C. to Boston, which completes the 700-kilometer trip in over 6.5 hours. Yawn. The TGV can go over 1,000 kilometers in just 3.5 hours. Not only is rail speed much faster in Europe, but prices and availability are better as well. Only by traveling by rail in Europe can one truly understand what we are missing out on here. Eisenhower set up the interstate highway system over 50 years ago, so we know a large-scale transportation overhaul is possible. A U.S. rail upgrade is long overdue. Fortunately, the government is showing some interest. The House recently passed HR6003, which would allocate nearly $15 billion for "Amtrak capital and operating grants, state intercity passenger grants, and high-speed rail over the next five years." This is a positive step, but its implementation is still a long way even from the Jamaican project, which is set to begin construction by the end of the year. And it is light years from the European high-speed standard, which has been operating for decades. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the U.S. high-speed train to leave the station.