The Short Line Railroad

Living in Nashville for nearly a year now has led me to one conclusion over and over again: this place needs some better public transportation.  Ironically, I live only a mile away from the only commuter train line in the area, but have never taken a ride on it due to its limited schedule.  For those of you not from Nashville, the city is made up of a network of poorly planned highways, requiring dangerous weaving on the interstates, greatly overcrowded auxiliary roads which require motorists to sit for ridiculous amounts of time in traffic, and no timed stoplights, meaning that multiple lanes of rush hour traffic can end up stopped by every single light.  Aside from the great amount of gas and time this trip consumes, it should be noted that there are only 626,000 people in Davidson County and 1.5 million total in the city and metropolitan area.  Yes, Nashville has grown substantially over the past few years, but considering its size, this sort of traffic is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the federal government is spending billions of dollars on national regional high speed rail lines that, aside from the Boston-Washington route, there is no evidence that anyone will use.

This does not mean that I am against high speed rail, quite the contrary.  However, I do wonder, when so much of our fuel and time is being spent on interstates and roads driving to and from work each day, why is it that we are spending billions on regional rail when we could just as easily spend that money building and upgrading commuter rail lines, short(er) lines, which have already shown great success in both new (Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Seattle, Phoenix light rail) and old locations (Chicago, Boston, New York/New Jersey, Baltimore/Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia).  We have a proven method that we are slowly adopting.  Maybe if we went more quickly and got people more comfortable with trains, Amtrak ridership would increase, making high speed options more feasible.

Now its Nashville's turn to really jump in and take a big step towards building a complete infrastructure for the future.