New York Minute

In July of last year I attended a seminar in Manhattan. I stayed with a high school friend in Jersey City and commuted onto The Island for four days. The trek into The City included a brisk thirty-minute walk to the train station, a twenty-minute trip on the train, a ten minute trip on the subway, and another five-minute walk to the seminar offices. The return trip, done after 10:00pm, included a ten-minute subway ride, a twenty-minute bus ride, and a five minute walk to my friend's house.

The same commute done by car would have been, well, a nightmare.

Every time I visit one of the larger cities in the world I find my appreciation for public transit refreshed. What blessings they are to let someone else do the driving, enjoy predictable schedules, and be able to read or type during transit. Every time I experience these blessings, I lament the lack of public transit in so many places in the U.S. Especially the lack of passenger trains.

It's one of my enduring dreams to one day see a rail line (high-speed, or monorail, or maglev, whatever) put in along the median strip of I-95, the artery that runs from Miami to Boston. How cool would it be to ride one train all the way down the eastern seabord? I have written letters to congressmen and -women (last year our district's rep sat on the Transportation committee) about this idea. And I think about how easy construction would be along all the other interstates with massive, unused median strips. I-40, I-80, I-25 . . . so many places for faster, cheaper travel.

I think that the United States still operates from the belief that the individual or family car is the best way to get around. And the longer we invest in automobile-based infrastructure, the longer that prophecy will fulfill itself. After all, trains will continue to be an expensive investment as along as few people are investing in them. Maybe as gas prices rise, however, we'll begin to rethink our foundational beliefs about transport. Maybe instead of assuming that it's best to be able to drive fifty or one hundred miles at the drop of a hat, we'll begin to live within a twenty-mile radius most weeks, but enjoy fast, convenient, and relatively cheap rail service which allows us to go four hundred or a thousand miles more frequently.

For the past three years we (Sara and I) have been trying to fit a trip to the Midwest into our budget. Our choices are flying or driving. With a toddler, both options are expensive and, in different ways, troublesome. One train to Chicago (along I-90) and another to OKC, on which we could recline or walk around with Gwendolyn, would be a no-brainer for me.

Maybe my dream will come true after we have fuel prices as high as Switzerland's.

~emrys