Use the Detroit bailout to transform US transit

The Democrats’ campaign to win a quick bailout of the US’s Big Three, Detroit-based automakers seems to have stalled. That’s a good thing, since the only kind of substantive conditionality they’ve been mentioning so far is that the car companies should retool more of their production lines to produce “hybrid” or “flex-fuel” private cars.
That is ways too incremental and tiny of a change! These companies should undergo a much deeper transformation– so that between them they can become a hub for innovation and production related to a new, nation-spanning network of high-speed trains and other visionary transit solutions.
Thinking that turning to a mildly re-engineered version of the privately owned automobile will provide any kind of a longterm solution to the country’s transportation woes is short-term thinking indeed. The nation that is economically and politically successful in 2050 will be one that has an efficient, multi-layered mass transit system that produces the minimal level of greenhouse gas emissions and offers a rich quality of life to all citizens.
There is no way that any version of privately owned automobiles can do that. The reliance that this country has long had on privately owned cars– and the concomitant degradation of its mass-transit structure over many decades– has resulted not only in unacceptably high levels of emissions of noxious chemicals and reliance on foreign oil, but also in massive economic inefficiencies and the active exclusion of all non-owners and non-drivers of cars from full economic and social inclusion. These latter costs are hard to quantify, but they are certainly substantial.
We need a strong and compelling vision of what a fully “inclusive” and efficient national transit system would look like– and we also need a huge amount of investment to be poured into realizing it. Exactly similar to what Pres. Eisenhower did with the “interstate highway system” back in the 1950s– but this time a vision based on mass transit, not on the private auto.
Luckily, much of the technology for a national high-speed train (HST) system already exists, since such systems have been well developed in both Japan and Western Europe.
Some people have argued that the US population is too widely dispersed to allow a national passenger rail system ever to become profitable. Perhaps that is so. But taxpayer subsidies of a state-of-the-art national HST system would be a very worthwhile investment, bringing dividends in many areas of national life… Including, if this system is linked to significantly upgraded transit systems in all major urban areas, a great improvement in the quality of life of all citizens, whether they currently own and rely on cars or not, and in the general parameters of their social, economic, and political inclusion.
Such a system would also, if well designed, do a lot to revive areas of the middle of the country that have become economically depressed due to the seemingly irresistible pull of investment and people to the two coasts.
Regarding the “quality of life” question, here are some quick vignettes from me:

1. A couple of years ago, we invited an Indian friend who was doing a term as a visiting professor in Winchester, Virginia, to come eat Thanksgiving dinner with us in Charlottesville, some 100 miles away. Dr. Prasad had no car and does not drive. I blithely suggested he check out the long-distance bus options to get to us. Winchester is the county seat of Frederick County and has a population of 24,000. But it has no long-distance bus service to anywhere else! No wonder if Prasad was feeling a little isolated and trapped there. But how about the thousands of longterm local residents who also, for whatever reason (epilepsy, vision problems, other disabilities, low income), do not drive? How isolated must they feel?
2. Just yesterday, I was able to get great long-distance bus service from New York to Washington DC. I sat on a comfortable bus, worked online for five hours using its wireless internet, and arrived near my apartment in Washington DC, feeling quite refreshed.
3. In 2000, four members of our family paid a three-week visit to a family of Japanese friends who over the years have scattered themselves into various different cities around Japan. We traveled nearly wholly by train, using ‘bullet’ inter-city trains that connected handily with the very well-run (and bilingually signed) local train systems in all the cities we visited. One day, our Japanese friend Masaru, a big-league tech entrepreneur, was going to play golf: He went to the golf course by train having previously sent his clubs ahead of him via one of the many companies that provide just exactly this service…
4. When my daughter and her partner (now spouse) were living in Detroit I went to visit and we decided to all go to Chicago for a short weekend break. I booked us tickets on the Amtrak inter-city service. The train was the usual run-down, out-dated rolling-stock that’s all that Amtrak can afford, and I recall it took the train seven or eight hours to trundle slowly along the 280 miles that separate the two cities…
5. Over the past 18 months, I’ve been trying to live as car-free a life as possible. Having exchanged the car I previously owned for a scooter back in 2006, earlier this year I gave that away, too. Now I come and go between Washington DC and Charlottesville using either Amtrak, the Greyhound buses, or car-pooling with friends; and in each city I have a bike. I know I’m lucky because I have a few back-ups when I absolutely need one. Bill the spouse still has his car, mainly in C’ville, and I use that with some frequency instead of always biking or bussing round town there; and I’ve rented a car maybe four times over the past year for the inter-city travel, when the Greyhound/Amtrak schedules didn’t work well for me. But still, being car-free has been a real pleasure. No need to worry about and pay for all those things car-owners worry about! Connected to a vibrant urban lifestyle instead of sitting in traffic unable to work and getting frustrated!

All of which is to say that re-imagining (and then rebuilding) the US transportation system as one that is based overwhelmingly on a speedy, efficient, and inclusive mass transit system is a project that can bring tremendous quality-of-life gains to most Americans and need not be looked at in terms of the “loss” of the “personal freedom” that car-ownership allegedly brings.
Freedom??? Freedom to do what? To sit stewing in a traffic jam tied to the task of driving but umnable to get anywhere for a good portion of each day? To emit unequaled amounts of pollutants into the air that everyone around the whole world breathes? To live a life of privilege insulated by the automakers’ glass and chrome from the reality of the lives of others– including those others who are excluded from the car-ownership “dream'”
No, I prefer the freedom of sitting in a mass-transit vehicle being driven by a professional while I read, write, work on the internet, or (if I choose) chat to my fellow-citizens. And yes, there would still be private vehicle “back-ups” for this lifestyle. But they need not be privately owned: Taxis, car rental companies, paratransit systems for the differently abled, and car-share companies like Zipcar should all be part of what is planned for. And yes, these supplementary car-based systems should all use be using the most fuel-efficient and emissions-free technology available.
But if the collections of talented and hard-working engineers, production people, and planners who form the backbone of “Detroit” are to be bailed out massively by the US taxpayers at this time, then surely we should do that on the basis of a National Transit Plan for 2050 that is visionary, far-reaching, inspiring, and attainable– and that doesn’t keep Americans still hog-tied to the socially divisive shibboleth of the private automobile.