"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends"
Janis Joplin

The drive in and out of downtown Chicago to any of its spread out suburbs has in the past ten years increased from thirty minutes in each direction, to over an hour and a half. That's if no one's car overheats and if it's not raining or snowing or perhaps looking like raining or snowing. Minor fender-benders produce "gazer's blocks" long after the offending cars have been pulled to the side. The suburbs themselves have become gridlocked in and around the approaches to shopping malls and the like. I suspect it's rather the same story in your area, unless you're lucky enough to live in Kalispell, Montana.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The traffic engineers promised it wouldn't be this way, but you have to find them before you can burn them at the stake of broken promises in the middle of an intersection. At zoning meetings across the country, they continue to give expert testimony (as paid consultants of the developer) that the proposed strip-mall or cineplex or shopping center won't affect your drive across town. It's possible that you may have arrived late for the meeting, the victim of a rush-hour that now extends from four to eight.

The private automobile is becoming a lousy way to get most urban places, but it's all we have in many instances and that's a sad state of affairs for a nation with our inventiveness. The automobile isn't going to go away, nor should it, but in the eyewink of eighty years or so it's entirely changed the way we go about our lives and our access to leisure time. On the one hand, we can get up to the lake for a weekend and on the other, seven hundred-fifty hours commuting is unconscionable in a year's time.

The Europeans do a better job of it with a pretty well balanced public transport system, but even their cities are beginning to choke. When I lived for a time in a central European capitol of just over a million population, I had the choice of three metro lines, twenty tram routes and as many bus lines. Service at peak times every three to ten minutes and a single ticket cost a quarter, a yearly unlimited-use pass about a hundred bucks. I never found a destination in the city environs that was more than two or three blocks from public transport. It was clean and safe and ran on schedule. Few residents submitted themselves to the agony of automobile traffic unless it was absolutely necessary.

Now the newspapers carry reports that China is considering the private automobile as a way to stimulate consumer growth. Can you imagine two billion automobiles? It boggles the mind and that prospect in a country with an average annual income of about five hundred dollars. They'll do it though, if they want to do it and damn the consequences.

There are better ways and we know all about the better ways, it's not as if they are a secret. Some of them we're even bringing back. I remember when I was a kid, we had a trolley system in Chicago. Yet we just couldn't wait to be modern and paved over the entire system in the fifties, trading clean trolleys for stinking diesel busses. Many of the downtown streets still have old trolley tracks under the asphalt. Now Chicago has proudly announced a program to spend six billion dollars to build a downtown people mover. A people mover is the current planning buzzword for a trolley. What goes around comes around.

Historically, every five years or so Chicago has added another lane to the Kennedy or Eisenhower Expressways, so more traffic can be funneled into the downtown. That's great and it works, more cars are able to get into the Loop. But there's no place to go once you are there. No place to put the car and the side streets are jammed. It's an inhuman and inefficient and stupid system, but we keep building it. Going back to downtown trolleys is a step in the right direction, but it's only a step, only part of an overall transportation system city-wide and nationwide that needs re-thinking.

I asked a friend how long it took him on a recent business trip to get to Cleveland from Chicago. About an hour flight, he told me. I meant how long did it take him to get from his office on Michigan Avenue to his company's branch office in downtown Cleveland. He looked a little chagrined and said well, you know how it is, he had to catch a two o'clock flight and who knows how long it'll take to O'Hare by cab that time of day? He left the office about quarter past twelve, got to Cleveland at three o'clock and then it was forty minutes from their airport. About three and a half hours, office to office.

That trip would take less than two hours by bullet train, direct from downtown to downtown with a nice leisurely lunch on the train and a little time to unwind or get his head together for a meeting.

But of course there is no bullet train.

There should be.

Japan has one and so does France. People with more vision than we have are beginning to look at old systems with an eye toward new technology. There's been debate about high speed trains in America too, but the experts worry about dangerous grade crossings and such. If a train hits a stalled truck on a crossing every once in a while now, they ask us to imagine that happening at two hundred miles an hour.

There is no need for grade crossings, that part's easy. We already have an interstate highway system that connects every decent sized city in the country and there are no grade crossings. Except for tolls and gas, you can drive nonstop from San Francisco to New York and that interstate network has a median strip the whole way, a median more than sufficient to accommodate a bullet train. That lovely green strip has already been bought and paid for and the interstate system goes downtown to downtown. City center to city center is possible at over two hundred miles an hour.

Why aren't we doing it, other than cost? For the most part, we're not doing it because the automobile lobby is too invested in building cars and the airlines see it as competition. The oil companies have their interests. A lot of powerful lobbyists feed at the trough of the automobile, airline and oil companies. In addition, the government-run Amtrak hasn't done much for the reputation of trains, souring Washington as well as the traveling public.

Instead of confrontation, we should find a way to get the automobile companies behind high-speed rail, as well as the airlines and oil companies. We need to create a way for them to profit by rail transport and then we will find ourselves at the beginning of a creative, rather than a confrontational dialog.

I propose as an example, that GM and Ford and Chrysler would build locomotives and operate the maintenance facilities. Perhaps Boeing and McDonnell Douglas would profit from the building and maintenance of rail cars. The heavy-construction and roadbuilding industries would compete for infrastructure contracts and perhaps the airlines would be both capable and interested in operating the system. It's not in the public or their corporate interest for them be so heavily invested in flying people anyway. They ought better to see themselves in the transportation business, however that's most efficiently and profitably done.

I believe it's a matter of finding a process, whereby a better way to do something doesn't have to damage an industry, but encourages them to modify their businesses and profit in other ways.

It's a big job and will require a major capital investment, at a time when we don't seem to have either the money or the will for big projects and heavy investments. But it's peanuts compared to the investment made in the interstates and President Eisenhower got that accomplished in the fifties and sixties. Capital was short at that time too, capital markets are always tight, but he did it with bond issues and the justification of national defense, because national defense was a popular issue back then. Yet the thing that made it work, the force that drove the legislation, was the enormous profit to be made by road contractors and the potential for automobile and gasoline sales.

Today the environment is the hot issue, as well as the cost and inconvenience of getting from Chicago to Cleveland or Chicago to its own suburbs. A consensus can be built around that, if we let potential profits lead the way and get the airlines, auto companies, brokerage houses and construction industry behind it.

It has been a mistake to push public transport without public support and Amtrak's proved that. We need to lay the problem before the opponents of high-speed rail and help them find a profit in it. Perhaps then they will lobby the congress for the project instead of constantly against it.

Bullet trains will only solve part of the problem. Another group at risk is the suburban commuter, who suffers in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Kennedy Expressway or any other major city's expressway system. In his behalf it's a matter of incentives on the one hand and understanding who benefits from his commute on the other.

For the most part, people come to the city for work or shopping, both of which benefit business.

In essence, increase the cost of driving and decrease the cost of public transport.

We need to consider the creation of area public transport tax entities that assesses the benefit and create the funding equitably.

What's wrong with fare-based public transport?

For the most part, it's counter-productive. Increasing fares encourage commuters to get in their cars again, undermining an efficient system and decreasing support. Chicago's already up to a dollar and a half for a bus ticket and everyone resents it, because the busses are dirty and unsafe, the service is unfriendly and the city's less well covered with each service cutback.

What would it cost Chicago to build a truly excellent system? An electric system, not diesel. Clean and quiet and efficient. Twenty billion? And what to run it, a billion a year? Two billion? That's achievable and the city and suburbs and population would benefit enormously.

Build it with bond issues. In a metro area like Chicago, the annual revenue requirement per billion would be about a hundred dollars per capita, give or take a dollar.

Hotels in Chicago already pay a room-tax, to support the expansion of convention facilities, which in their turn, fill hotel rooms. It's not unrealistic to expect business and industry and retail to support public transportation through a similar head-tax on their employees.

The streets would become less congested, the air cleaner, the population more civil, commuting time would be enormously reduced, and the city would become a more habitable environment. The alternative is the example of Athens, where they have been forced to ban all private automobiles from the city center because the air is no longer healthy to breathe. Mexico City is dying of its pollution, quite literally dying and the economic cost as well as that of the health and welfare of its citizens is beyond all measure.

We can ill-afford to follow those models and yet the precedent has been set here in the United States, rather than in the countries that have followed our lead to disaster. It should be incumbent upon us to lead the way out as well as in.

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