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It’s a curious truth, though not yet widely understood, that we pay for high-speed rail whether we have it or not. We pay not only in congested highways, delayed air flights and disastrous oil spills, but also in a cumulative national slowdown that might be called arrested development.

This point is conveyed by a sharply reported article in the Financial Times that describes the business, cultural and even culinary changes in London 15 years after the start of high-speed Eurostar service to Paris.

Paris is 213 miles from London as the crow flies (about the same as Washington from New York), but “Paris seemed almost as exotic as Jakarta to Britons” before Eurostar service began in late 1994, FT’s Simon Kuper writes.

Nowadays, “what strikes you when going from Paris to London are the similarities.” Boasting a quarter of a million French inhabitants, London has become the sixth-largest French city, Kuper notes, while central Paris is “packed” with British nationals, some of them commuting multiple times a week to London on the train.

Transforming Travel

Eurostar is more than just a sleek conveyance for spoiled travelers, but a fundamental driver of progress. Back in the 19th century, people spoke of steam trains as “annihilating time and space.” Until railways became widely available, humans depended on animals for overland transportation and were limited by such factors as the feed required for a team of horses.

Each subsequent transportation revolution – the development of steamships in place of sailing vessels, the advent of flight with the Wright brothers, the mass production of motorcars, the arrival of jet planes replacing propeller craft – packed a wallop that reverberated across boundaries and social classes, tying people together in new and different ways.

The automobile made suburbia possible, while jets turned tourism into a global enterprise, to cite two examples. Equally fascinating is that the technology undergirding all of these revolutions was widely known and available to all nations, but only in western Europe and the U.S was the technology exploited in full.

That is until recently when the rebirth of rail travel – trains operating at several times the speed of highway traffic on dedicated rights of way – was pioneered in Japan, improved in Europe and now exploited to the max in China.

User-Friendly Networks

American policymakers, preoccupied by budget deficits and poll numbers, appear to be missing the larger picture, namely, that our standard of living is dependent on deploying the latest tools in transportation. In many corridors, high-speed rail is the best solution among traffic needs and sound environmental policy, and concentrating public funds upon it would represent a vast step forward in the use of transportation money.

One basic element ignored in Washington is the recognition that current rail traffic is far below what it would be had intercity rail service been remotely adequate under Amtrak. Some train journeys take longer today than they did when Herbert Hoover was president. It is impossible to predict how much dormant traffic is waiting to be tapped by a revitalized rail system.

The Eurostar trains that link downtown London with central Paris in just over two hours have not only enlivened both cities, according to Kuper, but created “user-friendly networks” that allow scientists and businessmen to exchange ideas quickly.

With other high-speed routes connecting France with Belgium, Germany with Austria, Switzerland with Italy, and, soon, France with Spain, the balance of scientific networks, which shifted to the U.S. after World War II, has swung back to Europe, according to his analysis.

In other words, efficient transportation is as important to a city’s or nation’s bloodstream as unfettered capital markets or sustained R&D. Here’s hoping the Obama administration, which supports high-speed rail, starts to make the case for expanded funding with the same clarity and celerity as the business-minded Financial Times.

Photo credit: Slices of Light