High-speed rail in N.C. on a faster track?

The News & Observer reports that N.C. transportation officials are optimistic that the Charlotte-Raleigh-Washington route will fare well in snagging some of those $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail, and that it’s one of six corridors feds have said are likely candidates for the first stimulus funds to be distributed later this year. (Associated Press report here.) If that’s the case, then kudos to North Carolina for having worked for years to try to keep alive the idea of high-speed inter-city rail travel, even during years when many taxpayers thought the idea was just a waste of money.

I’m just back from a week spent traveling by rail in and around New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC. Took commuter rail from NYC to Princeton. Took heavy rail (that would be the subway) around Manhattan. Took Amtrak from NYC to DC. It was easy. It was fast. It was environmentally prudent. It was more convenient than flying — downtown to downtown. And the whole time I was on the train I didn’t worry a bit about landing in the Hudson River.

Does inter-city rail cost money? You betcha. But so do our taxpayer-built airports (don’t forget the air traffic control system), as well as the interstate highway system, with which we are all busily polluting our atmosphere (possibly destroying the global environment as we do so, though I think I’ll be dead before we know whether that’s really what we’re doing) and enriching some Middle Eastern potentates I’d just as soon not enrich. Everything’s a trade-off.