For a mere $1.35 billion dollars, President Christina Kirchner has signed the contract to connect Buenos Aires with Cordoba and Rosario, cutting travel times by more than 2/3rd.
Oh were you expecting to hear about cities in the United States receiving this transportation upgrade? Think again, President Bush and Congress have barely given Amtrak enough to survive, let alone grow and perform on the par of Europe. I took the EuroStar last year and was amazed at how great train travel can be. On the other hand I have also transversed the United States by rail and there is no comparison. Out of three train tickets, only one was ontime, the other two delayed by two and eight (yes, eight) hours.
So get a load of what we're missing...and Argentina is receiving:
The contracts have been signed, and the first high-speed railway in the Americas will be built very soon - but not where you're thinking. Argentina's new President Christina Kirchner, wife of former President Nestor Kirchner, signed the papers last month with a consortium led by French company Alstom to connect the country's major cities by high-speed rail.
The $1.35 billion contract calls for a 440 mile (710 km) high-speed rail corridor to connect Buenos Aires with Rosario and Cordoba. A second line will connect Buenos Aires with Mar del Plata in the future. The train will cut down travel time between Buenos Aires and Cordoba from fourteen hours today to a mere three hours a couple years from now.
The is quite a step in Latin America, where rail service has been systematically mismanaged, neglected and dismantled in recent years, and bus service has become the standard for long distance journeys. Not to be outdone by its neighbor, Brazil is planning its own intercity passenger rail service, with a high-speed connection proposed between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
Jealous? I certainly am. Instead of wasting all that money in Iraq, this could be one of the projects we incorporate into the budget to make America move faster and more effectively. Currently Amtrak touts the Acela, an overpriced ride with connections from Boston to Washington, D.C. that has a top speed of 150 mph. The only problem is that the tracks it runs on are owned by freight companies. So at most you shave an hour off the commute instead of the ideal two or three.
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