 | NARP blogTRAINS: A travel choice Americans want |
Yes, We Need All Those Routes and More
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Should some of the designated high-speed corridors be dropped because key markets have declined with the economy? No!
Increased market share for trains should offset any decline in total market size. People have largely stayed with trains and transit in spite of gasoline prices much lower than last summer, because people do not trust those prices to remain low—and indeed, they have been rising in recent weeks.
Likewise, people are considering the total cost of driving, not just gasoline costs. If they need to prolong the life of a car they cannot afford to replace, they are going to cut the number of miles they drive and look for travel alternatives—like trains.
Finally, the youth culture in the U.S. is shifting towards a view that “frugality is the new cool.” This was the finding of a major, Toyota-commissioned survey of the U.S. market, and is consistent with the fact that my two older sons did not race to get their drivers’ licenses when they turned 16 but waited months or years until the reality of terrible mass transit service where they needed to go sunk in.
Anyway, now is the time we should be investing in train capacity so it will be there when the economy recovers and people, increasingly attuned to environmental and family economic issues, will be looking for trains to ride.
—Ross B. Capon