Interstate Rights-of-Way: Future Rail Corridors?

Sure, we've all tossed this idea around in our heads. But think of it more seriously in the context of this economy and in the context of increasing prices for oil.

What if our interstate system, and the impending transportation stimulus package being discussed by our new president, were reformatted to include high-speed rail?

Read the article by Karrie Jacobs here.

...it’s time for us to look at the interstate system not as an aging network of highways in need of repair or replacement but instead as we might look at a navigable river. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, of Portland, Oregon, a noted infrastructure advocate, says the system represents “a tremendous national untapped resource.” It encompasses a lot of land. Funds were appropriated at the outset for the purchase of two million acres; according to one estimate, the system actually takes up 40 acres per mile, or 1.87 million acres. But what if we could make those highways beautiful, not by removing bill­boards, as Lady Bird Johnson did in the 1960s, but by using the corridors for more than moving cars and trucks? What if we thought of them as the backbone of a new, more diverse 21st-century transportation system? “It’s time for a different vision,” Blumenauer says. “And a principle for that is how we coax more out of existing resources.”

(Emphasis added by me)

While I've tossed around the concept of conversion of interstates into urban boulevards or transit corridors in the urban core, I never really though of the idea of converting the entire right of way, countrywide, into transit. Certainly, the bolded passage above is correct: interstate highways are so well funded and ubiquitous that their permanence as a national system seems guaranteed--much like a navigable river (well, the permanence part, anyway).

And so, it's not all that crazy to capitalize on their convenience and on their adjacent development to build transit corridors.

Imagine, I-55 becoming less a "highway" than a Metrolink line, at grade, throughout the city. It would theoretically be possible, then, to both restitch the urban fabric lost to interstate construction and to transport people effectively and efficiently. These highway-transit hybrids would function as cross-country rail in rural areas (think Amtrak), commuter rail in exurbs/suburbs (think Metrolink, the Illinois extension), and interurban rail in the city, which could then connect to existing urban transit systems.

I'm all for this innovative idea. The proposed funding imbalance favoring roads-as-we-know-them will be the biggest blunder of the new Obama administration if not addressed soon.