Leaving St. Louis

I’m back after a visit to St. Louis, and I can report to my fellow New Yorkers that the stereotype is true: we’re far more obnoxious and rude bunch than our Middle America cousins. Strangers smile and say hello and cashiers say thank you. “It’s a great city,” says my host. “But it’s just too far from anywhere else.”

According to Google Maps, St. Louis is 300 miles from Chicago. You could fly, but God forbid you’re carrying a 4oz bottle of shampoo. You’ll also need to tack on 2-3 hours for security and airport transfers, and then pray for good flying weather. The drive would take 5 hours in no traffic. So I guess my friend’s right—the hassle of traveling does make Chicago seem a world away.

Now consider Amtrak’s run between Chicago and St. Louis (284 miles), which is scheduled for 5 hours and 40 minutes. The train runs on delay-prone tracks owned by freight lines, with only four departures per day. Amtrak does run what they call a high speed service that trundles the 450 miles between DC and Boston in 6 hours and 30 minutes. Only in this heavily congested corridor does Amtrak offer a viable (but still mediocre) product. Everywhere else, it’s not just an impractical option—it’s a silly one.

Contrast this with:

- A Frenchman who boards a train in Paris, and finds himself on the German border at Strasbourg (300 miles away) in 2 hours and 20 minutes. That will drop to 1 hour 50 minutes when construction is complete in 2014.

-A Japanese who can travel from Tokyo to Osaka (320 miles) in 2 hours and 25 minutes.

-An Argentine, who will be able to travel the 441 miles between Buenos Aires and Cordoba (the same distance between Boston and DC) in just 3 hours when the Americas’ first high-speed link opens in 2011.

Building the Paris-Strasbourg link will cost €4 billion, which works out to about 3 weeks of spending on the Iraq War. A 2-track high speed rail line operates at an almost limitless scale—the Tokyo-Osaka link carries 375,000 passengers per day. Compare that to the busiest section of the New Jersey Turnpike: 14 lanes carrying 200,000 vehicles per day. Trains can be scheduled so reliably that the Madrid-Seville link offers a full refund if the train is more than 5 minutes late.

For those who still view an option that is cheaper, faster, more reliable and land-efficient suspiciously because the notion of traveling in style and comfort sounds vaguely French, consider how it might be tailored to fit America’s love of the car. Since many more of us live in the suburbs, we could build en-route suburban stations that would offer thousands of parking spaces. Or offer car-carrying overnight trains for families traveling longer distances. How about a train that takes an hour to travel the 200 miles from a secondary city like Illinois’ capital of Springfield directly to O’Hare?

Our Interstate highway system was state-of-the-art civil engineering in the 1950s. But now, there’s more than 300 million of us, our airports and roads are congested, and gas is nearing $4/gallon. Fact: we’ve fallen behind the rest of the world in transporting ourselves. And America’s not as big as we think—here’s a sample of four city pairs that fall within high-speed rail’s sweet spot of 200 to 500 mile trips:

- Boston-New York-Washington: 454 miles
- Los Angeles-San Francisco: 382 miles
- Dallas-Houston: 239 miles
- Chicago-Detroit: 283 miles

So here’s my advice to our Presidential candidates: stop talking about “fixing America’s infrastructure.” Boring, doesn’t mean a thing to John Q. Public. Instead, ask those swing voters in Missouri whether they’d like to park their car, walk onto a platform, and board a train that leaves exactly on time and gets them to get to Chicago in 90 minutes. On board, they can spend each second relaxing in a seat sized for an adult, sleeping or working. And they’ll step off the train in Chicago’s city center.

Or we can keep walking barefoot through security.