Amtrak And High Speed Rail

Contents: (1) Intro.; (2) What is High Speed Rail (HSR)?; (3) HSR Options; (4) Components of a HSR System: Conventional HSR; Track; Signal and Commun. Networks; Magnetic Levitation; (5) HSR In: Japan; France; Germany; Spain; China; (6) Background of Intercity Passenger Rail in the U.S.; (7) Previous Efforts in the U.S.; (8) Recent Congress. Initiatives to Promote HSR; (9) Potential Benefits: Alleviating Highway and Airport Congestion; Alleviating Pollution and Reducing Energy Consumption by the Transport. Sector; Promoting Econ. Develop.; Improving Transport. Safety; Providing a Choice of Modes; Making the Transport. System More Reliable; (10) Infrastructure and Operating Costs; (11) Ridership Potential; (12) Funding Consider.

Provides information on the ownership, usage of, and operations over, the Northeast corridor; the projects and costs associated with improvements to allow high-speed operations on the north end of the corridor; and the capital investment needed in the south end of the corridor. Charts and tables

As the US population grows—potentially adding more than 110 million people by 2050—cities and their suburbs will continue expanding, eventually meeting the suburbs of neighboring cities and forming continuous urban megaregions. There are now at least a dozen megaregions in the US, such as the one extending from Richmond, Virginia, to Portland, Maine, and the megaregion that runs from Santa Barbara through Los Angeles and San Diego, down to the Mexican border. In Designing the Megaregion, planning and urban design expert Jonathan Barnett takes a fresh look at designing megaregions. Barnett argues that planning megaregions requires ecological literacy and a renewed commitment to social equity in order to address the increasing pressure this growth puts on natural, built, and human resources. If current trends continue, new construction in megaregions will put additional stress on natural resources, make highway gridlock and airline delays much worse, and cause each region to become more separate and unequal. Barnett offers an incremental approach to designing at the megaregional scale that will help prepare for future economic and population growth. Designing the Megaregion explains how we can, and should, redesign megaregional growth using mostly private investment, without having to wait for large-scale, government initiatives and trying to create whole new governmental structures. Barnett explains practical initiatives for adapting development in response to a changing climate, improving transportation systems, and redirecting the forces that make megaregions very unequal places. There is an urgent need to begin designing megaregions, and Barnett offers a hopeful way forward using systems that are already in place.

North America faces a transportation crisis. Gas-guzzling SUVs clog the highways and air travelers face delays, cancellations, and uncertainty in the wake of unprecedented terrorist attacks. New Departures closely examines the options for improving intercity passenger trains' capacity to move North Americans where they want to go. While Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada face intense pressure to transform themselves into successful commercial enterprises, Anthony Perl demonstrates how public policy changes lie behind the triumphs of European and Japanese high-speed rail passenger innovations. Perl goes beyond merely describing these achievements, translating their implications into a North American institutional and political context and diagnosing the obstacles that have made renewing passenger trains so much more difficult in North America than elsewhere. New Departures links the lessons behind rail passenger revitalization abroad with the opportunity to recast the policies that constrain Amtrak and VIA Rail from providing efficient and effective intercity transportation.

During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.