A major reason in favor of the construction of high-speed trains in America is to relieve airways and traffic congestion. First, delays at airports are costly. Larry Johnson, director of the Center for transportation Research at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, calculates that passengers lose more that twelve million hours each year in delays at O’Hare airport alone. In 1986, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airlines, delays cost five billion dollars, including two billion in extra fuel and labor cost, for the ailing airline industry. According to the FAA, relieving airport congestion will cost one hundred and seventeen billion over the next decade (Mobey 14). Transportation planners predict that freeways will suffer from unbearable gridlock over the next two decades. Their conventional wisdom maintains that the U.S. cannot build out of this congestion. The Southern California Association of Governments says that daily commute time, in the Los Angeles area will double by two thousand and twenty and “unbearable” present conditions on the freeways will become “even worse”. By two thousand and twenty, drives are expected to spend Seve nty percent of their time in stop-and-go traffic, as compared to fifty six percent today. Similar predictions have been made for metro areas around the country. Yet the best alternatives that they can offer are to spend billions more on public transport that hardly anyone will use and to try to force people into carpools that do not fit the ways they actually live and work (Samuel p 1). Highway traffic is also costly. Maintaining the interstate highway system could run three trillion dollars over the next several decades (Moberg 14). Urban congestion is a hidden tax on the productivity and welfare of urban areas everywhere. In areas like Los Angeles and New York, this tax is eight billion dollars per year; nationally, about fifty six billion per y...
