In Does high speed rail in the midwest make any sense?, Unca Cece attempts to answer a reader’s question about the viability of a midwestern high-speed rail network apparently thought up by people who have never been to any midwestern city except Chicago.
For Chicago denizens, as Cecil points out, a rail network seems like a wonderful boost to the local economy. And to Chicago natives it also seems like a self-evidently wonderful idea…after all, trains are so useful here, those other cities must be just hoping they can join our magnificent life.
Well, in truth a lot of them might be. But getting there is a bit of a dilemma. You see, the train stations in those cities are not located in very useful places. It is relatively easy, for example, even in the current environment, to hop on a train in Chicago and ride to Detroit or Cleveland or something. Sure, it’s slower than high-speed rail would be, but not by all that much. The problem with doing so isn’t the speed, it’s that riding a train to Detroit or Cleveland gets you to…well…downtown Detroit or downtown Cleveland. Which is not where anyone going to “Detroit” or “Cleveland” is likely to really want to go.
When you fly to Detroit, for example, you land at Detroit Metro Airport, smack among a large array of rental car companies from which you can arrange the means to transport yourself around the region to whatever part of the Detroit metroplex you actually want to visit. It helps, of course, that Metro Airport is (from the perspective of a resident of the city of Detroit itself) way the heck out in the suburban boondocks, which also happens to be where just about anyone with enough money to buy a ticket to travel is going to want to be, if they somehow feel the need to want to be in the Detroit area.
If, however, you take a train, you’ll find yourself…at an Amtrak station. Where you’ll find…not much. Good luck renting a car. Don’t bother trying to get a bus to take you anywhere worth going. Cabs? Yeah, they exist, but good luck finding one in the true urban fashion (waving your arm in the air at passing vehicles until one stops). You’ll have to call and make a reservation with a cab company. New in town and don’t know even the names of the local cab companies? Not even much luck from Directory Assistance. They’d really like you to know the name of the business you’re calling. Oh, and pulling out that cell phone will immediately confirm that you’ve got enough money to be worth robbing, which will likely happen in short order thereafter.
While Detroit is unique in its degree of urban failure, it is not really unique in kind. These problems exist in almost every city in America to one degree or another. Chicago, New York, Boston, and Washington DC are the exceptions…the places where you can arrive on a train and then go about whatever business posessed you to go there in the first place with a minimum of logistical hassle. And note that (as Cecil points out) Chicago is the only city on that list which doesn’t already have a relatively-high-speed rail option.
When every dollar that goes to a boondoggle nobody but rail fans and pork-enamored Congressmen actually wants, and practically nobody at all will ever ride, is a dollar deprived from the improvement and expansion of rail services that are actually USED in the Chicago area (CTA, Metra, and the South Shore Line to Indiana, which has a competing bid for expansion, which bid would bring commuter rail service to several potential Chicago commuter towns that are currently un-connected to rail service), it’s especially important to consider our options carefully.