Getting Real About High-Speed Rail

[S]tart with the corridors where there is a certain density, and a high demand for something other than driving and flying. Prove out the concept with truly high speed rail, and then as people see the benefit of it, the demand for it in other places might increase.

In addition, we have to think about tolls and higher fuel taxesto discourage driving on the same corridors that have a lot of congestion on the road so that you drive people appropriately to the transit option. And then the third thing is, the U.S. has a growing population. You want to make sure that growth occurs along these corridors so that you have more density and more riders. Not just to get the riders, but so that you have your infrastructure and yourdemand in the same place because that’s the only thing that will make it cost effective and carbon efficient.

Most people don’t know how much it costs them to drive their own car. We have these externalized costs associated with owning the car, which we don’t pay every time we drive, so once we own a car and we’ve paid those costs, we only see the fuel costs... If we made it clearer, like with pay-as-you-drive insurance, and with fuel prices that more accurately reflected the cost of building and maintaining the road system and protecting the fuel supply, which is related to keeping peace in the Middle East andkeeping our access to a steady supply of oil and all the environmental costs... if the driver paid all those every time he/she filled the tank, we would be paying much higher costs all the time and would makedifferent decisions about how much we drove our cars.