Some Ideas On Improving Public Transportation In America

It seems that improving public transportation has been getting a good deal of attention lately (it's about time). Whether it's high speeds trains, light rail or other forms of mass transit - the goals are usually to improve how people move around their neighborhoods, cities and city to city. I came across two interesting articles recently; one on Japan finally exporting its bullet train technology - technology that Japan has long guarded but now finally sees the upside in letting other countries implement this amazing technology. Here is a link to the article.

On Tuesday, the Central Japan Railway Company took the visiting United States transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, on a test run — a 312-mile-an-hour tryout for the lucrative economic stimulus contracts that the United States plans to award to update and expand its rail network.

The other article looks at how early public transit in cities was privately financed by real estate developers and electric utility companies and they paid cities for the right of ways. The article suggests this is a good way to improve public transit, however attitudes in this country towards public transit probably would hinder this happening. Nonetheless it's quite intriguing and makes sense and maybe is not so far fetched.

More and more infrastructure is being privately financed today - toll roads, airports, charter schools, parks. So why not public transit? If you look at trains, this country would be well served by a private company(s) running high speed rail as Amtrak certainly hasn't done a good job.

With federal, state and local governments budgets already strained and our countries infrastructure in dire need of upgrading perhaps the revising the private sector financing makes sense?