INSUFFICIENT OPTIONS. Destination: Freedom welcomes coverage in the Sunday supplements.

With the exception of The New York Times’ editorial pages, the news columns of The Wall Street Journal, and until recently only a handful of other general news circulation papers, few news outlets, print or otherwise, have understood or written about in depth the transportation crisis we have created, or successfully explained it.

The article, by author Peter Richmond, is one of the most important to appear in more than a generation of generally spotty or shallow news coverage of the American transportation crisis, outside of specialty or academic periodicals, in large part because of its broad reach. Until recent congestion became “gridlock”, general assignment reporters were usually only able to spend a small amount of time on any given subject, and could not become instant experts at everything they covered.

That reference to "specialty periodicals" includes Don Phillips's columns in Railway Age Illustrated Trains, where he has been writing, repeatedly, about the coming strangulation of the transportation network.

Now Parade picks up the story.

Americans spent about 3.7 billion hours stuck in traffic last year, burning gasoline whose price had soared by 60%. At the airports, security lines snake endlessly, runways are choked, and delays are common. One recent study found that, between January and August 2007, one in four flights arrived late; 159 flights were kept on the tarmac for more than three hours in August. As a result, more than half of U.S. businesses augment commercial air travel with expensive corporate jets and charters. Isn’t there a better way?

Policy problems. Looking for a term paper topic?

1. How much of that congestion is caused by government failures elsewhere, including the insistence on rebuilding existing highways under traffic and failure to do relatively cheap things such as synchronize traffic lights?
2. What is the incidence of corporate welfare in the form of trucks on the highways and corporate jets in the airways using the road and air networks without bearing the opportunity costs.

But let's think carefully about what that rail alternative is going to look like.

Many transportation experts insist that the best answer to transportation gridlock is efficient intercity rail travel. Trains use one-fifth less energy than cars or planes. They run in bad weather. They’re business-efficient and tourist-friendly. Yet, since the early 1960's—with the exception of the Northeast Corridor, from Boston to Washington, D.C.—railroad transportation in the U.S. has become largely irrelevant. For most Americans, train travel from city to city remains an afterthought. And for good reason: Our national rail system is inadequate, relying on aging equipment and a shrinking route-map. The system sorely lacks both financial resources and government support.

I suspect that some Southern Californians might bridle at that "irrelevant," and the emerging corridors outside Chicago, including but not limited to the Hiawatha, continue to attract new riders without alienating too many existing riders. The ultra-fast electrified corridors, or the InterCity 110s that I keep advocating, are only part of the story.

As our airways and highways have slowed down, demand for train travel has been increasing. In fact, Amtrak ridership was up for the fifth year in a row, reaching record levels—despite the fact that a third of trains arrived late last year. In the Northeast, since Amtrak introduced higher-speed Acela trains in 2000, the railroad’s share of 10,000 daily commuters between Washington, D.C., and New York City increased from 45% to 54%.

“Train travel is the thing for a one-day business trip,” says Malcolm Edgerton, a Chicago architect who travels often from Chicago to Springfield on Amtrak for work. A recent trip, he said, “would have meant seven hours of driving, and I would have been exhausted. Instead, I left in the morning, did work on the train, got there at noon, did my thing, even had time to visit a museum. Then, on the way back, I drank Scotch in the bar car and traded stories with a salesman and another architect. The round trip was $40.”

(The nice thing about cut-and-paste is that I can lift chunks out of a column in a different order than the author put them in, in order to maintain the flow of my argument.) Note that the Springfield line might be good for 110 once all the advanced signalling and four-point grade crossing protection is in place. Excessive caution, I say. That expanded Springfield service uses Illinois money, which might reduce the public-choice dynamics (Turbotrains to Parkersburg, West Virginia?) inherent in Federal funding of the rail network.

The key to improvements may be federal incentives for state investment, say train watchers of all stripes. They point to two successful projects that relied heavily on state funding. Amtrak recently expanded service from Chicago to downstate Illinois and St. Louis, where ridership is up about 50%, and major improvements were made to the Philadelphia-Harrisburg line.

In light of those successes, the newly Democratic-controlled House approved $50 million in matching funds for state Amtrak projects, and the Senate approved a similar program for $100 million. “We are on the edge of a revolution in thinking and the thinking of policy-makers of the future of transportation,” says Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), who heads the House transportation and infrastructure committee. “And that future is filled with high-speed, reliable rail service.”

I'm not sure why the Shinkansen envy. The article misses a lot of the more prosaic action, including the six-car off-peak rakes on Metra, the San Francisco commute expresses to Silicon Valley, and the Lackawanna Electric into Penn Station. And although the Europeans might be investing heavily in upgrading their intercity lines, it's no accident that state-of-the-art electric and diesel multiple unit technology tends to be European: there's a lot of that Vienna to Wiener Neustadt or London to Oxford business to accommodate, and a lot of upside potential for that traffic in the States.