In Normal, Illinois, the construction of a new bus-train station revitalized a neighborhood in decline. (Illustration by Rodica Prato) Click here to view more Post covers featuring mass transit.

Over the past 50 years America made massive public investments in its highways—hundreds of billions of dollars in the interstate system alone. And largely because of that investment, cities and suburbs have grown into sprawling, disconnected clusters, largely dependent on the automobile. But America is changing, and it’s time to rethink the way we travel. “We have to change that and give people more options,” says John Robert Smith, president of Reconnecting America, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that advises local leaders on transportation planning.

What’s the problem with car travel? Not to put too fine a point on it, but our current network of roads and more roads (with a piddling number of trains and buses along the margins) is not sustainable. Today, 91 percent of Americans commute to work in a car, usually alone. The daily cost of fuel for cars is a staggering $1 billion-plus. Then there is conservation: All told, American drivers burn roughly one-quarter of the world’s oil. [See also What Government Needs to Do by Jim Oberstar, former chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.]

Demographic trends also reflect a country reconsidering its settlement patterns and transportation networks, particularly in light of an expected population increase of more than 100 million new citizens over the next 40 years. Much of the population—from retiring boomers and young people alike—will be closer to city centers where mass transit is available.

What is essential for the success of mass transit is not just building the infrastructure itself, but connectivity. Travelers need to get from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. But for mass transit to work well, those same travelers also need to be able to switch easily from a taxi, a bus, a ferry, an airplane, or a train in a matter of a few steps to continue on to point C. In Europe, trolleys and high-speed trains run into the airports and the switch is accomplished in a short escalator ride. It’s seamless, even intuitive.

In America, not so much. “We are 30 to 40 years behind Europe and Asia,” said Smith, who adds that the big push for mass transit will have to come from state, city, and county governments and filter up to the federal level.

Despite the obstacles to rebuilding America’s mass transit system—and there are quite a few obstacles—there are also a few bright lights. A few months ago, I went to California to write a piece about the proposed bullet train that would run between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There’d been a storm of political fighting over funding—the cost of the train may exceed $50 billion—and battles over where to put the right of ways, but it appears California will start laying track in late 2012. The 220-mph train would be one of the largest public works projects ever attempted in the United States, but California has a history of doing big and gutsy infrastructure projects.

While the complete bullet train is at least a decade off, California is moving ahead on mass transit. In 10 days of traveling between its major cities, I avoided renting a car, even calling a cab. For such a supposedly car-centric state, the connectivity was remarkable. For example, beginning in Oakland, I traveled to Sacramento on the Capitol Corridor, a train operated by Amtrak but subsidized by the state.

From there, I caught another corridor train, the San Joaquin to Bakersfield where I easily stepped on an express bus to downtown L.A. On the city’s metro system, I rode the Blue Line light rail out to Long Beach, the Red Line to Hollywood, and then city buses to see friends in Wilshire and Silver Lake.

To reach San Diego, I took the Pacific Surfliner which runs hourly out of L.A.’s Union Station, and then a trolley to my hotel in Old Town. Over the next few days, I was on Sprinter, Coaster, and Metrolink—all commuter trains—and the Surfliner again. And when it was time to fly home, I caught an express FlyAway bus from Union Station to LAX.

Outstripping ridership projections, light rail systems in Houston (top) and Charlotte (bottom) also attracted millions in transit-oriented development (TOD).

What is happening on the West Coast is being repeated around the country. New light rail systems are being built or expanded in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Charlotte. Cities, such as L.A., are actually restoring service where decades ago they literally ripped out street car tracks to make room for cars. But it’s not just trains. Buses operating on natural gas, hybrid engines, and even overhead electrical wires are redefining city bus service. And in rural America, counties and other entities are finding ways to bring mass transit—typically bus or van service—to people who can’t afford cars or are unable to drive.

Mass transit is very much in the public eye, which is not surprising when one considers rising gas prices, highway congestion, unsustainable suburban sprawl, and an aging population. In 2011, Americans took 10.4 billion trips on public transportation, the second-highest annual ridership since 1957.

“For a long time, most transit riders were captive riders. They couldn’t afford a car and had to use the bus,” says Todorovich. “Now we are seeing more people using it as a lifestyle choice.”

Lifestyles matter, too. Many experts see America’s embrace of handheld devices and the desire to be connected electronically as another factor favoring mass transit over driving. Drive a car and you can’t or, at least, shouldn’t text. “If you are on a train or bus, you can stay on your iPad or smartphone,” adds Todorovich. And buses and trains that are Wi-Fi equipped make connecting that much easier.

It’s a big step from wanting or needing mass transit, to actually building it. With little clear direction from the feds, the solutions will be different for different localities. Which brings us to the bus-versus-train argument. Many urban areas are choosing to build light rail—even though improved bus service can be just as effective and would be a ton cheaper, says Professor G. Scott Rutherford, director of the TransNow Regional Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. That’s because buses run on infrastructure already in place—namely roads—and they are able to easily go off that right of way into neighborhoods, such as suburbs. Building new right of ways for trains is difficult and expensive, especially when trying to retrofit rail into highly urbanized environments.

But many cities see light rail as the only way to lure people out of their cars, says Rutherford. “There’s a rail bias,” he says. “Hey, I love trains, too, but an honest analysis in many communities would show that trains are not as good as buses.”

He points out that the common image of the loud and smoky city bus is a thing of the past. Buses today are cleaner, quieter, and quite efficient compared to automobiles.

Just as important, despite my successful experiment in California, in most American cities, bus stations, train stations, and airports were not built with an eye toward connectivity. Most such travel hubs are separated by several miles—the only transport option is an expensive cab ride. Even where there are attempts at connectivity, they are often problematic. In Milwaukee, Amtrak’s commuter train stops near Mitchell Airport, but passengers have to board a shuttle bus and then be deposited at the front of the airport. At the Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) Airport, the new light rail train only gets within 1,200 feet of the baggage area. The train station is located in the parking garage.

The obstacles range from turf wars to simple lack of foresight: “You could put the bus right in the front of the terminal, but the airport doesn’t want to interfere with single passenger cars picking up passengers. And because it sells parking, it doesn’t want to sacrifice spaces to get the train closer,” Rutherford says. “A lot of problems are jurisdictional. Transit crosses regional and political boundaries and there are competing interests.”

The Looming Crisis In Mass Transit The Saturday Evening Post

The evening sun tinged the smoke a reddish-gray as it curled up from Gary’s steel mills. Indiana corn fields, ragged with last year’s stubble and damp with winter runoff, awaited spring planting. In eastern Ohio, night came on and the land went black. Blinking red crossing gates, the sodium lamps of main streets, and the window glow of farmhouses streamed past the window. 
Intermodal freight trains—double stacked with scores of shipping 
containers—rushed by the opposite way. After Toledo, I went back to my coach seat, wrapped myself in a sports coat, and slept to Pittsburgh, the bump and sway of the rails a familiar balm.

In the previous year, I’d ridden 26,000 miles on Amtrak trains, 
researching a book on the future of passenger rail. This coach seat to 
New York was a freebie earned from 
all the miles racked up on my Amtrak 
Rewards card. I could have flown, 
as most Americans do on business trips, but I wanted “train time”: the 
opportunity to unwind, read news
papers, write on my laptop, and zone out on the landscape.

Only 2 percent of Americans have ridden an intercity passenger train, 
not a surprising statistic considering the median age of the population is 
37 and American railroads gave up 
passenger trains in 1971, when Amtrak was created by Congress. Since that time, Amtrak has provided only a 
bare-bones national network, so for most Americans, a train isn’t a travel option. Finally, that may be changing.

Railroads and passenger trains are poised to expand in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. The $4-per-gallon gas crisis in 2008; the meltdown of the domestic auto industry; jammed and crumbling highways; stressed airports; a renewed focus on infrastructure 
improvements; the drive for a greener, more efficient economy; and the awarding of billions in federal stimulus dollars for high-speed trains all bode well for rail transportation. Even the big freight railroads, who own nearly all the nation’s rail infrastructure, have signaled a new cooperative attitude 
regarding passenger trains. They know that when the Great Recession is over, business will bloom again, and they’ll need government help to expand the infrastructure—not just for passenger trains, but for the intermodal trains that are surely taking market share from the trucking industry.

Warren Buffett, perhaps the country’s most respected investor and one with an expansive time horizon, sees American railroads as an industry 
with a bright future. Last fall, he and his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, plunked down $26.7 billion to acquire Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), the nation’s second biggest railroad. It already owned about one-third of the company’s stock.

Buffet, the so-called Oracle of Omaha who promotes value investing, called the purchase “a huge bet on that company. It’s an all-in 
wager on the economic future of the United States.”

A rail renaissance is underway. “Last century was the 
automotive century. I think 
the 21st is fixing to be the 
railroad century,” says Gil 
Carmichael, a former federal railroad administrator and the founder of the Intermodal Transportation Institute at the University of Denver.

Making it happen will 
require investment. Since the 1960s, the nation has lost nearly half of its rail infrastructure 
as railroads consolidated, 
removed tracks, and abandoned whole routes. Still, 150,000 miles remain, and these tracks run from city center to city center.

Carmichael and others are promoting Interstate II, or the Steel Interstate, a plan to double and triple track 20,000 to 30,000 miles of existing freight right of way. The tracks would be grade 
separated—meaning intersecting roads would run under or over rather than across the tracks. Intermodal freights could run 90 mph, passenger trains up to 125 mph, and heavy coal and grain trains could go their own slow speed. Initially, power would come from 
diesel locomotives, but eventually the corridors could be electrified, getting juice from greener sources, such as wind, solar, and biomass plants. 
Nuclear power is back in the mix, too.

“No leap in technology is needed to electrify trains. We know how to do that. The right of ways are already in place—we just need to expand them,” Carmichael tells me. “Putting billions into a rail corridor program would 
create jobs and build for the future.”

Some states are already ahead of the curve in this regard. In 2006, Amtrak and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spent $145 million to lay welded rail, put in concrete ties, straighten curves, erect an electrical 
infrastructure, and create a high-speed service on what’s known as the 
Keystone Corridor.

But nationwide, improving transportation infrastructure—whether it’s a 
rail line, a canal, an airport, or a highway—seldom comes quickly, cheaply, or without controversy. Congress created the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission to recommend where the country should concentrate its resources in 
the coming decades. At first, the 
commission wasn’t going to consider rail, reasoning there wasn’t enough data to compare it to highways.

Then, Frank Busalacchi, a commission member and head of Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation, formed a separate “passenger rail working group.” He gathered experts, held 
public hearings, and even got some commissioners to board a train. In its final report issued in early 2008, the commission called for spending $225 billion annually on infrastructure, 
including $8 billion to $9 billion each year on intercity rail.

“Those commissioners who thought trains were old fashioned got their eyes opened. When you look out 50 years with perhaps 100 million more 
citizens, it’s clear you cannot meet the transportation requirements of this country with just air travel and highways,” says Busalacchi. There has to be investment and a shift to more mass transportation by rail.

Without rail, the study estimated, the country will need nine new airports the size of Denver’s and a doubling of the current 49,000-mile interstate highway system.

At 5 a.m., the Capitol Limited dropped me and a handful of passengers in downtown Pittsburgh, where we had a two-and-half-hour wait 
before boarding the Pennsylvanian to New York. The station was chilly; food came from vending machines, and 
outside, the city was still asleep. I walked a few blocks but failed to find a restaurant for coffee and breakfast.

If I’d been in Germany or a dozen other First-World countries running 
national rail systems, my connecting train would have waited across the platform or arrived within minutes. The station would be busy with people, restaurants, and newsstands.

It used to be that way in America. We had grand terminals and the best rail system in the world, built in the 
19th and early 20th centuries by privately owned railroads that were subsidized by government through land grants, easements, legislation, and generous loans. Railroads made modern life 
possible and knitted together a disparate people and sprawling geography, said John Hankey, a historian and 
former curator of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum.

“Good transportation is that important. By nature, we ought to be five 
different countries. The reason we aren’t is the railroad,” he says.

But railroads also were monopolies, big corporations wielded by tycoons and Wall Streeters. Their errant ways and fearsome reputation lead to heavy government regulation. When automobiles and cheap oil came along, federal and state governments saw no need to help the private railroads. Instead, they poured billions into subsidizing roads.

The decline in train ridership was well underway by World War II, 
when military research and development in aviation—again funded by government—led to the emergence of commercial aviation. But the stake 
in the heart of the privately run 
passenger train was the interstate highway system. Those wide, concrete swaths with nary an intersection or stoplight beckoned us to hit the roads in tens of millions of gas guzzlers churned out by Detroit.

For the average American, cars 
versus trains became a simple process of substitution, even an expression of freedom. No longer captive to a big 
organization like the railroad, we could go where we wanted, when we wanted.

“We’re Americans. We don’t like to be restricted. We embraced the automobile. It would have been denying our nature not to,” Hankey says.

At the time, trains seemed passé, 
a relic of another age. Abandoned 
by passengers, their freight business 
decimated by trucking, railroads 
were in terrible shape. In 1970, the 
nation’s largest railroad company, 
the Penn Central, went bankrupt and shook the country’s financial system. Other railroads would follow unless government acted.

To avoid nationalizing the industry, Congress came up with Amtrak, an 
entity that would relieve the railroads of their passenger trains. In return, the railroads agreed to give Amtrak priority over their routes, but even today 
passenger trains frequently are shunted to sidings to make way for freights. Sometimes, it’s because there’s just one track and not enough room for all the traffic out there. No surprise then that Amtrak has a long history of poor time performance and marginal service on shared right of ways.

The problems really go back to the beginning, when Congress gave Amtrak two mandates—run a nationwide 
system and create efficiencies that would turn a profit. Amtrak has never made a profit, and in its 39-year history has lurched from one financial crisis to another. To stay solvent, it’s needed about a billion dollars a year in subsidy.

In terms of government dollars going into the transportation modes, that’s 
a drop in the bucket. But more importantly, profitability of passenger trains was a ridiculous notion to begin with, says William Withuhn, former curator of Transportation at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

“We’ve been hearing since 1971 that if Amtrak was reformed, got new equipment, or got rid of certain trains and routes, it would make a profit. It’s all a crock,” he says. “Passenger trains do not make a profit. Neither do roads or airports. That’s not the purpose of transportation. It’s national cohesion; it’s about moving people where they need to be. The reason America doesn’t have a world-class passenger rail 
transportation system is because it hasn’t paid for it.”

When the Pennsylvanian left 
Pittsburgh shortly after dawn, it took nearly five hours to reach Harrisburg 
(2 hours longer than driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike), but finally I had breakfast and a couple of newspapers to read. And for the first time, I traveled over the famous Horseshoe curve near Altoona, which was built in the 1850s to climb the Alleghenies. At the state capital, the Pennsylvanian switched out its diesel for an electrical locomotive, shook off the doldrums and cranked up to 100 mph. It wasn’t like the TGV I’d ridden in France, but it was a fast train—a demonstration of what can happen with investment. Trains aren’t just rapid but regular on this corridor—14 times daily each way—and frequency is what builds ridership. It’s the mantra I heard from rail experts everywhere—dependable, frequent, and fast service on corridors 100 to 500 miles long 
(distances too close to fly and too 
inconvenient to drive) are the sweet spots for rail.

Like Pennsylvania, a few state DOTs subsidize Amtrak service between their major cities, even going as far to 
purchase their own trains 
because Amtrak is too cash strapped to provide equipment. Washington has put $100 million into the Amtrak Cascades corridor between Portland and Seattle. Wisconsin subsidizes the Hiawatha service between Milwaukee and Chicago and plans an 
extension to Madison. Illinois will soon have 110-mph-Amtrak service between Springfield and St. Louis.

California’s efforts dwarf all others. In the past 20 years, it has invested $2.2 billion in corridor trains and created a network of feeder buses and light rail that extends Amtrak 
service to 80 percent of its residents. In January 2010, it received $2 billion of stimulus money to begin building a 200-mph-train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Florida received $1.25 billion for a high-speed train from Tampa to Orlando. Both will run on new right of ways separate from Amtrak and the freight railroads. If these investments between the states and federal government continue, America may see its first true bullet train in 10 years and an Amtrak system that fulfills its promise. There may even be an Interstate II.

In Philadelphia, I switched to the Acela, currently America’s fastest train. Capable of 200 mph, the Acela averages just 80 mph on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, 
D.C., because of curves, a patchwork electrical system, and tunnels that go back to the Civil War. The corridor 
infrastructure needs billions in rehabilitation to make it truly high-speed.

Still, more than 100 trains move along it each day, and Amtrak captures half of the air/rail market between the big East Coast cities where trains never went entirely out of fashion.

My Acela crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey, ran through the gritty streets of Trenton, and blew by the auto traffic on I-95. In the Meadowlands, the Manhattan skyline and a bright, full moon rose up on the horizon.

It took 22 hours to cover the 900 miles from Chicago. In the 1930s, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited did the same run from Chicago to New York in 16 hours. And it didn’t arrive at a charmless, utilitarian Penn Station complex, but at Pennsylvania Station, a gem of Beaux-Arts style 
architecture, and truly one of the great buildings of New York.

They tore it down in 1964 in the name of urban renewal, another 
casualty of a country that allowed its passenger rail system to go to seed.

As the preservationists said then of Pennsylvania Station—never again.

Waiting on a Train The Saturday Evening Post