Getting Up to Speed – NYTimes.com
Jun/091
In France, Mellier pointed me to the small city of Reims, about 90 miles from Paris, which has effectively become a Parisian suburb since the opening of the Strasbourg line in 2007. You wonder if Bakersfield could become a bedroom community of Los Angeles. In recent years, moreover, some French cartographers who think about the social effects of train transportation have taken to creating new maps of Europe that simultaneously reflect the time and the distance between cities. These “time space” drawings of France (the technical name is anamorphic maps) have a distorted look as if someone crumpled a paper rendering of the country and pulled all the surrounding cities closer to Paris than they really are. Marseille is half its real distance from the capital, as are Strasbourg and Lyon. Mostly this is because of the TGV, which seems to have knit the country together in a way that air travel never did. Alain L’Hostis, a geographer at the Université Paris-Est, told me that the train has undoubtedly changed the psychological distance between places. For the French, he said, the mobility has created among many citizens “a feeling of belonging to a common or interconnected city.”
As a survivor of an Amtrak journey up the coast, I recalled those 13 hours unconnected to any California city at all — not a particularly pleasant feeling. When I asked Schwarzenegger about the social effects of a rail line, he quickly replied, “I think people will look at the state and not just say, ‘Oh, my God, I have to go from the south to the north, what a schlep.’ ” That was kind of like what L’Hostis said to me, but in a different way. After Schwarzenegger thought for a moment more, he said, speaking of his own commute by private jet: “I fly from Sacramento to Los Angeles, and it takes two hours. And if I would fly commercial, you would have to add an hour, or an hour and a half. Imagine. What if I could do high-speed rail?” I could picture a crumpled time-space drawing of his state. In my mind, and maybe in his, too, the big cities of California were already moving closer together. (from The Architecture Issue – Getting Up to Speed – High Speed Rail in California – NYTimes.com)
The prospect of American high-speed rail is horribly exciting to me. As the article states, Reims has easily become a suburb of Paris thanks to high-speed rail. Suddenly 30, 40, 50 or more miles is just a quick train ride away. Regional airplane flights would be a think of the past. Instead of flying from Kansas City to Chicago, you could take the train instead.
America is lagging behind when it comes to transportation infrastructure. Japan and Europe have been leading the way for decades. It took us nearly thirty years to finish the interstate system, and that was a major boom to travel and the economy. Since Eisenhower took inspiration from the German autobahn, it’s high time Obama take inspiration from the TGV in France and bring environmentally friendly high-speed rail to the United States. It also creates countless jobs in construction, engineering, and manufacturing. Seems like a win-win to me.
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