#2 - MYTH OF EXCEPTIONALISM

America is still, indisputably, the world’s biggest economic power with the biggest consumer market and, while it is sagging, an outstanding industrial infrastructure.
But they can’t or won’t get it right! Stubbornness? Intractability? Conservatism? All are to blame. But the biggest blame can be laid on self-delusion. If they were as “exceptional" as they keep saying they are, the country would not be lagging so far behind the rest of the world in transportation infrastructure.

I’ve been here before. It has been years since I suggested that a government/private consortium could build the world’s most comprehensive high-speed rail network. When $150 a barrel oil and 9/11 crippled the airline industry, I said this is the chance America has been waiting for. It’s again the old “When you get lemons make lemonade.” Turn disaster into opportunity. I suggested then that government should propose to the airline industry that they join in a massive overhaul of transportation. Airports would become, as they are in major European cities, terminals for high speed rail. But of course, that would mean the dreaded “public enterprise,” and the echoes of the spectre of (ugh) socialism! Run for your lives, the Russians are coming, and old stuff like that.

So Obama, who has dithered on the edges of mass transit reform, has said he wants to spend $53 billion to develop high speed rail networks. Of course, the Republican House says it’s a “luxury” the country cannot afford in this time of growing deficits. Calling high speed rail a luxury is like calling food an indulgence. Bound by the toxic combination of right-wing orthodoxy and fear of government involvement, the opposition continues.

I am not a transportation expert, so I am not sure whether or not the rail system functioned during the horrible weather of the last few weeks; weather that strangled commerce and shut down airlines. (There was also a precious irony in the thousands of cancellations. To speed up airline service, new regulations say that every passenger must be paid for having to wait for a flight after a spoecific period of delay. The result is that instead of postponing flights and paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties, everything was cancelled.) I know there were delays with commuter rail, but maybe a lot of that was because commuters couldn’t get to the station to catch the train. Their cars were stuck in the snow, as if the car was the only way to get anywhere.

We Canadians are not doing any better. For more years than I can remember, I have deplored the fact that rail travel to our country’s capital is mired in the 40s. Just as America will, if Obama can ram it through, build new lines especially for high speed, Canada should have long ago created a new high speed route from Toronto and Montreal to Ottawa. Leave the existing rail lines to carry local and freight. Come staggering into the 21st century.

Just to rub a little salt into the wounds of inaction or stubbornness, China will lead even Europe, in high speed electric transit. While America continues to delude itself with the belief in greatness, lesser countries are taking the lead. I can hardly wait for Brazil to get into the act.