This week, the Transportation Department released an audit revealing that airlines have failed to provide quality customer service. In response, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona have announced that they will sponsor legislation in the next Congress to force airlines to clean up their act. "Road rage" has become a startlingly widespread phenomenon. However, no airline passenger bill of rights will rectify the high prices, delayed flights, and crowded airports associated with air travel. And no amount of highway construction will alleviate the endless traffic jam.
Despite the $80 billion per year we spend on our highway infrastructure and the $19 billion per year on our aviation system, our nation's transportation system is in serious trouble. As a December 1999 editorial in The Los Angeles Times put it:
California faces the millennium with its transportation stuck in the freeway-mad jet-age 1960s. The state that pioneered the instantaneous connections of e-commerce and e-mail stands on the verge of a broadband revolution that promised to pipe feature movies into homes in seconds. But residents still pack themselves into automobiles that travel at Eisenhower-era speeds for most intercity journeys. Or into shuttle jets that spend more time waiting for takeoff and circling their destinations than en route.
What's true of California is true of the rest of the nation as well. Indeed, a recent study issued by the Texas Transportation Institute points to the fastest and most pervasive growth in highway congestion we've ever experienced. Meanwhile, our nation's airports aren't working. In 1991, for example, 23 airports experienced flight delays in excess of 20,000 hours. Today there are 27 airports with delays surpassing this amount, and the number is expected to grow to 31 by 2007.
Already, highway and airport access to many downtown business centers is at capacity for four to six hours per day. And as regional economies continue to shift to a service and technology industry focus, improved mobility between major cities within a region becomes crucial. Without the ability to attract new employers and employees to these centers, commercial development will slow down sharply.
Unfortunately, most of the "easy" highway and airport infrastructure has been built; remaining options for expanding that infrastructure -- particularly where it is needed the most -- are far more expensive to complete. Land development constraints, environmental costs and community concerns have significantly raised the cost of adding new highway and air capacity. The cost of the Los Angeles Freeway (State Route 105), for example, was over $125 million per mile; Boston's 7.5-mile central artery or "Big Dig" will cost more than $1.5 billion per mile to complete. The new Denver International Airport cost $4.2 billion.
What to do? How do we give this country the transportation system it needs at a time when our highways and airports are struggling with gridlock and winglock?
The answer is incredibly simple. It is time for the U.S. to do something it should have done a long time ago -- invest in a first class national rail passenger system that links its major cities with modern, efficient, comfortable, high-speed trains.
The effort to do precisely that has already begun. The new Amtrak board and management team have produced the best six months in Amtrak history during the second half of 2000. Amtrak is well on its way to operational self-sufficiency.
And high-speed rail has finally arrived in the United States. Amtrak's new Acela Express has just begun service between Boston and Washington. These sleek new 150-miles per hour trains have the capability to cut travel times between New York and Washington by 30 minutes, and between Boston and New York by a full hour and a half. By the fall of this year there will be 10 express roundtrips a day between Boston and Washington, and eight of the new and much improved regional Acela trains -- 18 roundtrips in all. And the price for a three-hour trip from downtown Boston to downtown New York will be one third less than the fare for the air shuttle.
But Amtrak's efforts are not focused simply on the Northeast. High-speed rail projects are under way all over the country.
The Midwest Regional Rail Initiative. In late August, Amtrak and the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois asked six train manufacturers to submit proposals to build a fleet of new trains that can provide high-speed service in the Midwest.
The Empire Corridor. In New York State, the first of seven Turboliners capable of 125 mph speeds between Albany and New York City recently came off the assembly line to begin testing.
The Atlantic Coast Corridor. In northern Virginia, officials broke ground last summer on a $10 million project hailed as the first step in creating a high-speed corridor between Washington and Richmond that will ultimately continue on to Charlotte and Atlanta.
California. The state legislature has approved a $700 million funding request by Governor Gray Davis to improve passenger rail. Amtrak and California recently unveiled plans for a five-year, $5 billion high-speed rail program.
Cascades Corridor. Washington, Oregon, Amtrak, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad are engaged in a multi-year program to reduce travel times and increase service along the Eugene-Portland-Seattle-Vancouver route. New Spanish Talgo trains are already in operation along the corridor. Ridership is skyrocketing.
Florida. In November, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring the state to build a statewide high-speed rail system. The state has already asked Amtrak to plan and design the new system.
This kind of ambitious rail development plan will require a modest but consistent amount of funding. Amtrak needs approximately $1.5 billion per year in capital investment to meet its goals. But compared to the billions in Federal dollars we are spending on airports and highways, that $1.5 billion is chump change.
And rail development will yield enormous dividends. First, it will open up our airports to the kind of long distance flights that only air can provide while making it possible for people to travel between cities that are no more than 300 or 350 miles apart from downtown to downtown quickly and comfortably. Secondly, it will help to relieve our highways of the kind of congestion that makes traveling on so many of them a nightmare these days.
The results so far on the first of the Acela express and Acela regional trains in the Northeast are very encouraging. Ridership on the Acela regional trains is up nearly 50 percent over the trains they replaced. Ridership on the first of the Acela express trains is substantially higher than original estimates. In short, millions of Americans will ride the train if they get the kind of speed and service that the people of Europe and Japan have been enjoying for years.
But we need action this year in Congress. A bill to provide Amtrak with $10 billion in capital funding over the next 10 years came close to passage in the closing days of the 2000 congressional session. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, and Minority Leader Thomas Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, have agreed to co-sponsor a similar bill this year. Let us hope that 2001 is the year when America finally makes the kind of commitment to high-speed rail that it should have made decades ago.
