Passenger Rail in Our Lifetimes. What a Concept.

Seriously, what are we doing?

I had the pleasure of speaking at APTA’s giant TRANSform conference in Chicago last week, joining a panel on the future of high-speed and intercity passenger rail. It was a lively discussion with three colleagues who I really admire, and I found myself returning to a point I’ve made many times before: America doesn’t have a technology problem when it comes to passenger trains. We have an institutional problem.

We know how to build trains. We know how to build track, electrification, signaling systems, and all the other pieces of a modern railroad. Other countries have been doing this for decades. Nobody’s sitting around waiting for someone to invent high-speed rail.

So why do we keep acting as though it’s some crazy, nearly impossible undertaking?

During the discussion, I pointed out that Americans want to know their tax dollars and their support for passenger rail will translate into meaningful journeys within their lifetimes.

Think about how absurd that sounds. Anywhere else in the developed world, suggesting that people should be able to ride the trains they’re paying to build before they die would hardly qualify as a bold policy position. Here, it’s practically revolutionary. Crazy talk. Nuts.

Nobody wants to hear that some wonderful new service will be ready in 2060. They want trains they can ride, connecting places they actually need to go, on a timeline that bears some relationship to a normal human lifespan.

Part of the problem is that we’ve spent decades accepting scarcity as the natural condition of American passenger rail. One train a day. Minimum frequencies. Minimum rolling stock. Minimum station amenities. Minimum capacity.

Then we occasionally conclude that Americans don’t like trains.

Gee, imagine that.

And whenever somebody suggests we ought to do better, the response is almost always the same: “Well, you know, times are tough. We’re in a tight budget environment.”

You know what? It’s been a tight budget environment for five decades. We’ve normalized scarcity, manufactured scarcity, as an unavoidable feature of transportation policy without seriously questioning the political choices that produce it.

Yet somehow, when America decides something is a genuine national priority, we manage to dig into the couch cushions and find considerably more money for other priorities than passenger rail would ever need. The question isn’t whether we can afford better trains. It’s whether we’re willing to make them a sustained national priority.

And sustained is the important word.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law gave passenger rail something it hadn’t enjoyed in generations: five years of predictable Federal funding. Look at how much we’ve been able to get moving with just those five years. Now imagine what we could accomplish with a genuine long-term commitment.

Because money buys projects. Certainty builds an industry.

Factories, skilled workers, construction equipment, engineering talent, supply chains: all of these things require businesses to invest, and businesses need some confidence that the work won’t disappear when the next budget fight rolls around. Our stop-and-start approach has left us decades behind countries that figured this out long ago.

But there’s another trap we need to escape. We’ve gotten awfully good at designing passenger rail around the meager service we already provide, rather than the demand we could create. Give people frequent, reliable, comfortable trains, useful schedules, good connections, and stations that work, and they’ll use them. They do it all over the world. And we see from looking at record-breaking ridership on Amtrak’s Mardi Gras between New Orleans and Mobile, or the Borealis between Minneapolis/St.Paul and Chicago, that they’ll pack the coaches even when the trains aren’t as frequent as they should be, or as reliable as they could be, or with stations that meet ideal conditions.

For me, success isn’t simply having a few high-speed rail lines on a map by 2035...or, likely, even later. Success is when millions of Americans can look at a trip of a few hundred miles and simply assume the train is a practical option. High-speed trains, conventional trains, long-distance trains, and local transit should all work as parts of one transportation system, reliable, transparent, and as regular as sunrise and sunset.

I closed my remarks by reminding the room that everyone there — planners, engineers, agency executives, railroad professionals — is also a passenger, a citizen, and a member of a community. We all have a role in making the case that better passenger rail is possible, reasonable, and entirely achievable.

Because it is.

It’s not magic. It’s not rocket science. Other countries have been doing it for half a century.

We can do it here, too.

We just have to decide we’re going to.