I can get to Chicago in about 45 minutes now.

Monorail!

Let’s hope Durbin can get this done. The flight might be 45 min., but when you add travel to and from Lambert and O’Hare/Midway, plus the waits in the terminal, a four-hour train ride might well be attractive.

Cost/benefit analysis tells me that this is a stupid idea.

timbo, the train isn’t going to pick you up at your front door. You STILL are going to drive to the respective stations and then take 4 hours to get there. A plane is going to be quicker nearly 100% of the time save for bad weather.

High speed rail is long overdue across America. This will create jobs and link America’s cities closer together with much better service than Amtrak can provide with their current structure where they share tracks with freight railroads. This investment in infrastructure is good for the economy!

Good for the economy? Do we know the cost to build this line? Do we know what the charge to ride this high speed train will be? Who is paying for the line to be built? I think all of these questions must be answered prior to making a blanket statement about it being good for the economy.

As a business person, I can not believe on the surface this is good for the economy. We do not have the money laying around. We will have to print it or borrow it and either way does not seem to be financially responsible. Let us get all the facts before we pronounce this a great idea.

Would “high-speed” really only amount to a four hour trip between Chicago and St Louis? Right now, if you take the Amtrak and if (admittedly, a very big “if”) the Union Pacific does not pre-emptively force your train onto a siding while you wait for their freight train to pass, you get to Chicago in 5.5 hours. That would mean that the “high-speed” line shaves only 1.5 hours off the total travel time. This seems strange to me. I would have thought that “high-speed” would be higher speed than that.

Meanwhile, I am a very big proponent of rail travel. I think that there are all sorts of good reasons why we ought to prefer rail over airflight as a means of travel between American cities: it requires less fuel to move people overland than through the skies, a terrorist cannot hijack a train and slam it into a building, bad weather is less disruptive to trains than it is to planes, etc. That said, I really cannot understand why this is the sort of thing that should need government spending. If there is really an advantage to rail travel (and I think that there is) then there should be a consumer market for a rail option, and private investors should be willing to lay out the capital necessary for the venture because there is a return to be had on that investment.

Perhaps if the Senator wants to see high-speed rail, instead of throwing taxpayer money at the venture, he should simply move to eliminate the subsidies that the government currently affords to airports and airlines. Make airlines strictly liable for all deaths and injuries that occur on their flights and then let the airlines pay for their own security and infrastructure (instead of having the taxpayers foot the bill for these costs via the TSA and the FAA). Then the costs of an airline ticket would accurately reflect the expense necessary to sustain our air-travel system and consumers would have a price incentive to choose rail instead.