Letters to the Editor
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Getting trains into the system
It's starting to get a little repetitious, Patrick writing about airport congestion while carefully avoiding any mention of the *rest* of the transportation system, and we letter writers making repeated calls for a decent intercity rail system to pick up much of the traffic in the 0-500 mile range. Well, it bears repeating so let's just keep repeating it.
Perhaps the situation will unblock when one of the airlines - probably a secondary carrier in an important, congested market - finally notices that they could offer faster, more frequent, and especially more reliable service if they arranged to transport their passengers (holding air tickets) on a comfortable high-speed train instead of the congested, unreliable air link being used by their competitors. Such a far-seeing airline would lobby *for* immediate upgrades to the rail system (instead of fighting it tooth and nail), say the proposed Midwest corridors converging on Chicago or the California High Speed Rail project, with stops both in city centers and right in the airport terminals for connecting flights. And that airline would see their market share go up by quite a few points... until the other airlines got in on the deal too.
(Why not the Northeast? Because Amtrak already has > 50% of the air/rail market between NYC and DC - this is a rare legacy of the U.S.'s 1930s world leadership in ground transportation - and I don't see as much of an opportunity for a big shift there.)