I’m sure we all agree that more and better passenger trains will lead to stronger central cities and a benign urban renewal. And maybe we are arguing chicken-egg as to whether more and faster trains is more important than more and better local connections. The main problems are political will and money, as ever.

Nowadays, thanks to a few strongly supportive words from Obama, the excitement is over HSR. So I’d say, ride that wave in Congress and get substantial funding committed.

Next we can turn to more and better funding for urban transit. When that money starts to flow, we could quickly see more transit projects get underway in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, as well as Jacksonville, Charlotte, Memphis, Tulsa, and Atlanta.

@ AlexB
Airports aren’t well connected, but when I say “i’m flying from new york to LA”, you ASSUME that I’ll be renting a car when there. if I say “I’m taking the train/greyhound to LA” (impossible, but this is just a thought exercise), you’ll say (but there’s no train to LAX). culturally, we associate air travel with auto travel afterward, while we associate rail/bus travel to a city with rail/bus travel in the city. Secondly, your point about the transcontinental misses the spirit of my argument. Back then the rail was built by corporations seeking to connect either freight shipments to/from the west to the east, or one time migrators or leisure travelers. It was far easier also to walk through cites and get where you wanted to go without needing a streetcar simply because cites were smaller back then.

HSR works well based on population sizes and the distances between them. Local transit works well with proper population densities. You don’t necessarily need population density for HSR, but a useful downtown train station will encourage the density that leads to local transit.

In Cali, San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento all have significant transit operations already, while L.A. is committed to growing, with a couple of projects underway. Seattle just opened its major light rail line, while Portland has a fair-sized and still-growing system. Chicago, with an extensive transit system, sits at the hub of proposed HSR lines connecting with cites that have some rail transit, like St Louis and the Twin Cities, and some that have none, like Detroit and Cincinnati. Even the routes in Texas and the Southeast can’t be written off, as Dallas is doubling it rail system, and Atlanta and Charlotte at least have made a start.

But not every city requires a rail transit just yet in order to increase long distance rail ridership immediately. In a hundred smaller cities and towns, most passengers can arrive on what is in effect kiss-and-ride transit, being dropped off at the station by family members or friends in cars, if not a taxi.

In any case, it’s great to see support for better train service snowballing in Congress and the many bidding states. I hope that’s not limited to HSR and can include more conventional trains at better times on the existing Amtrak system and routes to be restored or added. And let’s hope that the enthusiasm spreads to funding more and better transit connections to inter-city rail.

last weekend i went from portland to seattle on the amtrak cascades and took a local bus directly from king street station in seattle to my neighborhood destination north of downtown seattle. i did not ride in a car once the whole time i was gone, including walking from my home to the station.

For the California system, LA, SF and San Jose have pretty good transit service with a block of their future HSR stations.