by Stephen Dreyfus

Created on: June 23, 2008

On September 11, 2001, despicable terrorists viciously attacked America by turning passenger planes into weapons of mass destruction. Americans were afraid to fly, even though including the casualties of 9/11, flying was still safer than driving. Air transportation will never be the same. Increased security, or at least the illusion of increased security, takes time and money. But a recent report about overwhelming delays at airports named an unexpected culprit: Too many people are flying in and out of New York City. The air space around New York is so crowded with planes, that the delays in New York, create a ripple effect of delaying flights throughout the country.

And now a new crisis is hitting the airline industry: soaring fule prices. Soaring fuel prices fuel soaring air fares, which soon makes it so expensive only the rich we be able to afford to fly.

The first time I flew to New York, it took as long to get from LaGuardia Airport to Manhattan, as it took to get from Charlotte to New York. On another occasion, severe auto traffic made it take so long to get to Kennedy International Airport from a nearby suburb, that I missed my flight completely, and had to get another flight the next day.

Airports take up a lot of space, and the bigger the city, the bigger the airport has to be. So hearing that New York needs another airport, got me to thinking; if it already takes a couple of hours to get to the city from the airport, where in the hell could they put another airport? Then I got a brainstorm.

Why not build an airport, fifty or even a hundred miles from the city, and connect it to the city with a modern super-fast MAGLEV bullet train like they have in Europe, Japan, and China? At 240 miles an hour, you could get from the airport to the city, or vice versa in less than 30 minutes!

Well, one idea leads to another. (This is why thinking is so dangerous!) So the next thing I realized was, that if you only wanted to travel a couple hundred miles, you would still have to travel as much to and from the airport as the distance you flew. So it would make far more sense to simply connect cities only one or two hundred miles apart, with bullet trains that can cruise along at over 240 mph.

Then I realized that the problem with America is that we are missing the third tier of passenger transportation: trains. For decades, trains were the ultimate form of transportation in America. The only other viable choices were horses, or boats if there happened to be a river

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