6th
I just don’t get the high-speed rail initiative. I just don’t see the real advantage to an Ohio corridor — why take a train to a place where you will almost certainly need a car? We might have dreams of our cities being navigable by public transit and/or foot, but we are not there. Imagine a typical business visit — need to get to a hotel, dining/entertainment, and some office building that could be anywhere in a 20 mile radius of downtown. If you want to bounce between any given two or three “cool things” in Cleveland — say, a great Little Italy restaurant, a show in Playhouse Square, and an after-dinner drink at an upscale Tremont bar. Maybe it’s a hip design kid and he wants to see a show in Collinwood, a huge grilled cheese sandwich in Lakewood, and a Gauguin exhibit in a world class art museum. We have a great city but it’s just not highly connected right now.
A second issue with the Ohio high-speed corridor (everything’s a corridor, right? Is that supposed to make prosperity and good times sound as if they’re right down the hall?) — if there is a lot of business travel between the three C’s, doesn’t that just mean we’re pilfering jobs from each other? I see no real win in a Cleveland engineering firm winning business because it’s now so accessible to a Cincinnati company, or a Columbus web shop getting in a major Cleveland corporation. What we need is a link to the coast, to major prosperous cities where we can ply their corporations with domestic outsources, using our India-like cost-of-living to our advantage. Yes, the link should probably be Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Washington, and then the C’town-C’bus-Cincy link makes some sense as a follow-on.
But this then points to the overall problem. When the Ohio-Erie canal was a vital link, then replaced by train, we were moving resources and goods. What are we looking to move now? It’s people. I can only imagine that business travel is at an all-time low, and where do we think it will go when bandwidth and tools makes video-conferencing as ubiquitous as e-mail?
I have this uneasy feeling that we’re trying to dig a canal to compete with the iron horse and are going to look like idiots. The resources we should be looking to move now are ideas and plans and electronic products. Bits. We need infrastructure to move bits — which either exists or is well on the way. Investment there makes sense. Once that is in place, we need investment to help attract the people — permanently, not on visits — to our side of the electronic link. We need a vital culture and community for the singles, and clean and safe spaces for the marrieds (to over-simplify). I don’t see this “green” rail helping either, and frankly what is even greener than moving people with high-speed rail is letting them stay put and do their jobs.
Am I wrong?
