Reason #80: Off-Amtrak - (No One) Aboard!

One solution to our energy woes, of course, would be to create - or recreate - a public transit system so efficient that people wouldn’t need to drive everywhere and guzzle so much gas. I’m not just talking about buses and subways, but high-speed rail that makes commuting between cities faster than hopping on a plane.

You can’t truly appreciate how pathetic our current railway system is until you compare it to that of the Europeans and Japanese, who commute between cities in 200 mph bullet trains. While they’ve had the foresight to develop high-speed rail, a cast of bureaucrats and businesspeople have all helped to ensure that trains remain one of the most sluggish and unappealing ways to travel. Why crawl along on Amtrak when you can drive or fly?

Yet for decades, transportation experts have looked to the example of the Japanese and Europeans, and lobbied for a high-speed rail system as part of the answer to insane freeway traffic, smog-choked air, and oil dependence, not to mention airport delays. And what have we accomplished? A single high-speed line, the Acela Express, that rumbles on bumpy tracks between Washington and Boston typically around 135 mph-barely faster than the speed Japanese engineers first achieved for their passenger trains in 1964. Meanwhile in 2007, a French bullet train hit 357 mph.

The greatest irony is that train proponents have done just as much to scuttle progress. In fact, the biggest argument to not build a high-speed rail system is the example of Amtrak, a mismanaged, money-losing disaster since it was created in 1971, a virtual pork project on wheels. Amtrak needs to die so that bullet trains can live if, for no other reason than even the name sounds cool.

NEXT: Reason #81: Gasholes and Jackgases - Isolation on Wheels