Dear EarthTalk: If train travel is so much less polluting than driving or flying, why are passenger rail options in the United States so limited compared with Europe? And is anything being done to shift more travelers over to American rail lines from cars and planes? -- Jeffrey Orenstein, Bradenton, Fla.
Dear Jeffrey: It is true that train travel is one of the lowest-impact ways to get from point to point -- short of walking, jogging or bicycling. In the early part of the 20th century, with car and air travel both in their infancies, taking the train was really the only practical way for Americans to get from city to city. And take the train they did: By 1929, the United States boasted one of the largest and most used rail networks in the world, with about 65,000 railroad passenger cars in operation across about 265,000 miles of track.
But a concerted campaign by U.S. automakers to acquire rail lines and close them, along with a major push in Congress to build the world's most extensive interstate highway system, combined to shift Americans' tastes away from rail travel and toward cars. As a result, while Europe focused on building its own rail networks, the U.S. became the ultimate auto nation, with more cars per capita than anywhere else in the world. By 1965 only 10,000 rail-passenger cars were in operation across just 75,000 miles of track.
In response to the declining use of America's rail network, the U.S. government created Amtrak in 1971 to provide intercity passenger-train service across the country, running mostly on pre-existing track already in use for freight transport. Today, Amtrak runs about 1,500 passenger cars on 21,000 miles of track connecting 500 destinations in 46 states. In 2008, more than 28 million passengers rode Amtrak trains, representing the sixth straight year of record ridership for the publicly owned rail line. Even with this growth, the United States still has one of the lowest intercity-rail-usage rates in the developed world.
But that may change soon. Last spring, President Obama allocated $8 billion of his stimulus package toward development of more high-speed-rail lines across the country, citing the need to reduce both greenhouse-gas emissions and reliance on foreign oil. Currently, only one high-speed rail line exists in the United States, Amtrak's Acela Express, which can reach speeds of 150 mile an hour on its Washington to Boston route. The success of high-speed, high-efficiency "bullet" trains in Asia and Europe -- where train rides can be as fast as flying but without the long waits and security hassles -- has helped convince American transportation analysts that the United States should also take the high-speed-rail plunge.
The first round of federal money will go toward upgrading and increasing speeds on existing lines, but the majority of it will be used to jump-start construction of new high-speed lines in 10 corridors across the country, including in northern New England, across New York State, across Pennsylvania, in and around Chicago, throughout the Southeast, and up and down the length of the West Coast.
A 2006 study by the Center for Clean Air Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology concluded that building a high-speed-rail system across the United States -- similar in scope to that proposed by Obama -- would likely result in 29 million fewer car trips and 500,000 fewer plane flights each year, saving 6 billion pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions -- the equivalent of removing a million cars from the road a year.
■ Do you have an environmental question? Send it to EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; submit it at www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/thisweek; or e-mail earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement