Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

There’s something terribly wrong with the transportation system here in the U.S. I live about 30 miles south of New York City. My family lives just south of Washington, D.C. The distance from my house to theirs is about 200 miles one way. The cost of tolls and gas makes the total round-trip cost of visiting my family about $75. The drive takes me just under four hours with normal traffic (that means two slow areas and the rest smooth sailing).

Now, if I want to take public transportation from here to D.C. it costs me almost TWICE what it costs to drive. The round trip tickets are $130 and that doesn’t even get me all the way to my family’s place. I still have to take another train to get within 20 miles of home and then have them pick me up there. After all the driving to train stations, parking, taking a second train, and driving the rest of the way the total time is nearly six hours one way and the total round-trip cost is about $140. That’s just ALL WRONG!

It should be backwards. The cost of the slower, public transportation should be half of the cost of driving. In fact, in most countries the train would be faster, but that would just be a miracle here. I look at the Japan train system as a stellar example of an advanced economy that has managed to build a cheap, fast public transportation system. I wish the U.S. had done the same.

The thing that really annoys me the most is that, if we had a train system similar to the Japanese one, I could live in D.C. and commute to New Jersey every day for work and it wouldn’t take me more than an hour and a half to get to work. I drive nearly that amount of time today and would gladly commute that far if it meant living in my home town.