Old Wizard

Stimulus Puts Railroads on Fast Track to the Future

I have a different cut about mass trasportation, even though I have been a proponent of 100mi/hr+ passenger rail for certain corridors for many years. My main focus today is in solving the gridlock that exists in our large city-suburban complexes. The amount of gasoline expended every day by commuters travelling to and from work due to traffic jams amounts to billions of gallons per year. Unfortunately, high speed rail between cities won't affect this waste very much. Take the northeast corridor as an example, going from DC to New Youk City is less than 4 hrs. and is very competitive and more comfortable than going by air and oh by the way is one of the only profitable routes in the USA,today. It still doesn't have the tracks which support it's inherent speed for the whole route. On the other hand, on both ends of this trip there are traffic bottle necks that stretch for at least 40 miles from the city's boundaries. The problem could be solved by building monorail spiders that run on electricity along the highways instead of increasing new road capacity. These spiders would have webs that connect to the existing hiways and in-place mass transportation hubs. What good does it do to increase car mileage if much of the advantage is wasted in traffic gridlock. Will those 40 mile electric cars expend much of that raange stuck in traffic? Sometimes looking outside the 9 dots before we emulate what works in Europe might yield a result that is tuned to our problem. In Europe, how many large suburban complexes exist compared to the USA,how many cars/capita, how many people live 25 miles or more from where they work?