If I were poetically or musically gifted, this blog would glide to the cadence of Arlo Guthrie's 'Ridin On The City of New Orleans'. But I'm not so gifted, so you're stuck with my stilted prose.
Nonetheless my recent ride to New York City from New Haven on Amtrak's Acela summoned the same wistful, mournful tones of Guthrie's ballad, with perhaps a touch of irony borrowed from Peggy Lee's 'Is That All There Is?'.
I normally take the Metro-North commuter line into New York. Slower, but much less expensive. Today I was meeting someone from New London on the way in, so it was the Acela.
The sleek frame glided quietly to the platform at New Haven's Union Station. It's tarnished aluminum skin somewhat diminished its high-tech aura, and suggested the all-too-familiar neglect of routine maintenance that has fostered three trillion dollars of crumbling infrastructure in this country begging for deferred maintenance. Once aboard, the seats were comfortable; the ride, smooth and quiet, but slow. This too was no surprise, as the Acela's performance in the Northeast Corridor was long recognized to be sub-par due to the fact that in many sections the tracks were not modified to support its potential. So, once again, we have the image of high tech masking a culture of managerial mediocrity. No Japanese or French bullet trains for us. We'll just do it on the cheap, yet again, and get by on image.
I did not get to New York much faster on the Acela, but at four times the cost.
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Then, why is it that President Obama wants to build a system of regional express rail lines? Certainly, it is not based on the underwhelming performance of the Northeast Corridor where the need is likely greatest.
I suspect that this is part of the President's 'stealth energy strategy'. I call it 'stealth' because I perceive that he recognizes fully the seriousness of the constrained energy scenario we face in the next few years, and for decades to come; but he is still reluctant to face it directly, or speak to it directly to the American people.
So he speaks of trains, and wind turbines creating green economy jobs, and smart grids freeing us from our 'dependence' on foreign oil. But nowhere does he come right out and say: 'Folks, we're headed into an energy Armageddon, not caused by the Arabs, but by global society's collision of its infinite demands with its finite resources. We're going to have to re-tool our society and our priorities to new realities.'
I can understand why he does not make such a statement at this time. There's only so much bad news the public can take without tuning him out, as so many have the evening news. Still, the problem remains, and a problem ignored will ultimately set its own agenda, as the economy has so dramatically demonstrated.
Where do express trains fit into all of this? As energy returns to $147 within the next five years, but this time for good and not as the result of momentary speculation, one could reasonably expect that the airline industry will become particularly vulnerable. It can sustain itself in the long haul routes for which there are no easy substitutes and sufficient customers to pay the ticket at some level of service. But for the commuter and shuttle routes, substitution will kick in wherever feasible.
You can't make a rubber band big enough or a lithium battery light enough or an extension cord long enough to power a 737 medium range jet in place of fossil fuels, but you can run a bullet train on the grid. And therein lies the Obama high speed rail strategy: not about rail, but about energy, and sustaining some level of economic normalcy through t-economic substitution.
The problem is, he cannot sell this stealth energy agenda to a skeptical, debt weary public. He must educate the public to the real threat, its magnitude, its complexity, and its proximity in time. He must link the reality of economic calamity from a business-as-usual approach to energy and the climate to an alternative strategy of hope and challenge in building a sustainable society with true quality of life, albeit striped of the excesses we have mistakenly come to regards as wealth. Without such a recognition of reality, the best we are likely to see is serial half-hearted, under-funded, mediocre measures much like the Northeast Acela.
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It would be easy to despair of the future, given our society's capacity to embrace our mythology of our past deeds in preference to building a future on present accomplishments. But a few weeks after The Ride, I happened to watch an episode of Nova about the last mission to the Hubble telescope to retrofit it for the last time. Not everyone will necessarily identify their aspirations with a high-tech telescope, but I found in the program a source of hope. Here were a group of people, dedicated, resourceful, intelligent, courageous, committed to something greater than themselves, and succeeding under extremely high risk at something truly meaningful.
We have not lost the capacity for greatness. It is our to regain and grow, if we choose.
Onward.
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