President Obama has been supporting this new high speed rail line, or so the headlines would leave me to believe. Despite the title of this post and the associated picture, I am actually quite excited about this. The sooner we can rely less on oil, and cars in general, the better. I am all for public mass transportation. I wish Atlanta had a better public transportation system. For those of you non-Atliens, we have Marta which makes a plus through Atlanta, one line going north and south, and one line going east and west. It's great if you want to go to somewhere on the plus, but otherwise, you're up shit creek (which is also 7 blocks away from Marta).
This new high speed rail line gives a lot of potential to lower travel costs, I imagine it will also bring down the cost of airline tickets. When I first read about the project, I got very excited at the possibility of having a high speed rail line straight from Atlanta to Vegas, or at least maybe Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I won't be making the cross country journey via train, as the tracks don't go anywhere near the mid west. It's great if I chose to take a trip up to Washington DC, but the map is set to for the most part keep me on this side of the mississippi. It's as if the people who designed MARTA were asked to make a train system that made it easier to travel around the country.
It really does nothing for the West coast. I suppose it lightens up traffic on I-5 a little. The entire Mid-West is omitted from the track, though I imagine - I hope - the plan is to eventually connect all of the lines. There are even plans to hit two canadian cities, yet none to bridge the East and West sides of America. This is why we have such strong tensions between gangs on opposing sides of the country.
I'm sure there were several considerations taken, but I would have foreseen something more along the lines of this (Ignore the circles and highlighted Oklahoma). This plan hits the biggest cities in America as well as sweep into several of the other high travel cities that are in path along the lines between the large cities. This also hits most of the major airline hub cities (which I'm sure is part of the reason Obama's map doesn't look like this).
Cities this map covers:
- Miami
- Atlanta
- Nashville
- Washington DC
- Houston
- New York
- Boston
- Detroit
- Chicago
- Kansas City
- Oklahoma City
- Dallas
- Denver
- Salt Lake City
- Seattle
- San Francisco
- Albaquerque
- Pheonix
- Los Angeles
- (After drawing the map, I realize I should have maybe included New Orleans btw Atlanta and Houston)
yea i live in atlanta too and this will be a good thing.. though marta isnt bad, they should just keep expanding it
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree. It is a good thing, and someone brought it up to me later today that probably the reason there's no coast-to-coast track planned right now is the Rocky Mountains. Hopefully, there will be some connecting lines in the future though.
ReplyDeleteSame for Marta, I hope one day they'll expand it a little more. Though, I doubt I'd still be in Atlanta by the time they finished a project like that.
Yeah, New Orleans would be key, and you're still leaving out the Upper Midwest. Although noone lives in the Midwest so it wouldn't be that much of a loss.
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