Alt transit: high-speed rail for the Midwest.

• Author: Johnson, Christopher

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For Rick Harnish, even to recall the experience of riding on a bullet train is thrilling. "You feel the acceleration conning out of the station," says Harnish, who has traveled on high-speed trains in Europe and Asia. "There's this weird sense that the speed is really hard to discern, except an interesting thing happens at about 150 miles an hour. It starts to sound like you're in an airplane because the wind is rushing by so fast."

Despite this sensation, he adds, "It's actually a smoother and more comfortable ride than anything you have in the United States." That's because the track and train suspensions are built to higher standards.

Harnish, executive director of the Chicago-based Midwest High Speed Rail Association, envisions a similar high-speed rail network to connect the cities of the Midwest. The network, planned to cover about 1,400 miles in all, would link Chicago to Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, the Twin Cities, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati.

It would travel at speeds up to 220 miles per hour, whooshing passengers from Chicago to St. Paul in two hours and forty-five minutes and from Chicago to Cleveland in just over two hours. The trains would be safe and quiet, with comfortable seats, and would emit far less carbon into the atmosphere than do cars or jet airplanes.

Dream on, you say? Well, Harnish believes it is a dream that could come true.

"The Midwest needs high-speed rail because we're really spread out, and we've got a lot of very important economic assets and social assets," he says. "So we need a less expensive, safer, and more convenient way for people to interact more often."

In Harnish's view, the United States has reached the limit of productivity for its highway and air networks. "The quality of both has declined, especially on the aviation side," he says. The folks standing in airport security lines this spring for upwards of three hours would not disagree.

Japan's Shinkansen network first started running with bullet trains between Tokyo and Osaka more than a half-century ago, in 1964. French TGV trains connected Paris and Lyon in 1982, and the system has since spread out like a giant spider web to carry passengers from Paris to most corners of France, garnering 100 million riders a year. High-speed rail links Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, and other cities in Spain, attracting nearly 17 million riders in 2009. In just ten years, China built a high-speed network of more than 6,000 miles. Taiwan and South Korea both boast high-speed rail lines.

High-speed trains are "a proven and mature technology," says Anthony Perl, co-author of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil. But the United States has lagged badly--not only in high-speed rail but in all passenger rail.

"We have had a long-term near-death experience with our rail infrastructure since the 1950s, partly because we poured billions of dollars into competing highways and airports," says Perl, a professor of urban studies and political science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "That kind of imbalance had a big effect on the railroads."

Over the years, the Federal Highway...