Super Eco

Photo credit: terrywha, flickr.com

I moved to Europe for its mass transit, specifically its trains. Seriously. I love train travel. One of my best trips happened when I took the train from Vancouver to Toronto.

Now, I live in a small city in Northern Spain that's surrounded by mountains. And yet I'm not isolated. By high speed rail (HSR), I'm six hours from Paris, five from Madrid and six from Barcelona. And when they finish cutting through the Basque mountains, Madrid will only be 2.5 hours away. With advance purchase, it's cheaper and more comfortable than driving or flying and pollutes the environment much less than either.

Imagine then my glee when I heard that President Obama wants to invest in a high speed rail network bases on the systems already in place in France and Spain.

Since the completion of the HSR link between Madrid and Barcelona, air travel has decreased by one-fifth and train travel has increased by one-third. And the Spanish airline Iberia plans to cut 7% of its domestic flights. That's a lot of heavily air polluting planes not taking off.  

The US, however, faces a challenge that neither France nor Spain have to worry about: size. The US is much larger than European countries and connecting the various regions in the US could prove at the moment an insurmountable barrier.

Fortunately, Obama doesn't claim that as a goal. Instead he has identified ten potential HSR corridors based around major population centers throughout the country.

This ambitious long-term plan could easily be dismissed as a pipe-dream, but with real money invested in the initial stages and with the construction of the HSR corridors seen as a way to stimulate local economies, I applaud Obama for taking the long view and going for something more important than immediate gratification.