GETTING THERE THE SENSIBLE WAY. Popular Mechanics sounds out John Stilgoe on Passenger Rail.

While Amtrak could potentially upgrade the speeds of its existing California-based trains to 110 miles per hour (from a 79-mph average), at that speed they won't get travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2-1/2 hours—as fast as an airplane would if you count time for check-in, security and transport from airports to city centers. Still, the price for the bullet train line is far higher than all available funds from the stimulus. This project will need at least $27.5 billion ($12 billion to $16 billion in federal dollars, $9 billion from bonds raised by the state of California and $6.5 to $7.5 billion in private capital) just for the first phase—building track that will run from San Francisco to Anaheim (San Diego and Sacramento are not included in this phase). The total cost for the project is estimated to be between $40 billion and $45 billion.

This kind of hefty price tag has experts outside California thinking twice about a future American landscape full of high-speed trains. The U.S. doesn't need new 200-mph-train routes to divert passengers from airlines, says John Stilgoe, Harvard professor and author of Train Time. Stilgoe believes that there will be a huge resurgence in train travel in the next fifty years, without high-speed projects that require entirely new track to be laid down. His research models, based on real-world travel patterns, show that "a lot of people want to travel at [speeds no faster than] 100 miles an hour for distances up to 150 miles," he says. "Improving the current train infrastructure, and in some places really upgrading it (so there can be Acela trains between cities like Chicago and St. Louis or between San Francisco and L.A.) can be done with existing technology."

Cliff Black, Amtrak's head of communications agrees. "Absolute top speed is not as important as reduction in operating time," Black says. "An incremental speed improvement from 79 mph, which is our normal top speed outside the Northeast, to 110 mph will give us many hours of reduced running time over a broad spectrum of routes."

I've referred to Professor Stilgoe's work previously. I'm pleased to see that incremental, feasible improvements to existing passenger trains is emerging as Amtrak's preferred option.