Staycation Planning
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit
Last week was the local fair in where I live. Sure in a small town in Wisconsin the local “fair” is a weekend of the same carnival rides you’ve seen for the past five years, the same games and a few bands (both local and past their prime). Of course over the last few years the local fair has become the family vacation as gas prices rose, making traveling for a vacation less than desirable.
Remember when vacations meant taking a plane to some far-off, but still-familiar location, or the multiday car trip with convenient stops to visit rarely seen relatives. Come to think of it, I guess there may be a benefit to not traveling so much.
I heard that airline tickets are going up again next year with an average around $600. Soon this will eliminate the casual flyer from taking a vacation anywhere they want to go. Of course here in the United States we can always fall back on the classic road trip. Of course, with $4-a-gallon gas, the classic road trip might be more local than long distance.
In Europe should you want to travel and not use a plane or have a car, you can always use the train system. Here in the United States that’s not going to be so easy. I looked into using Amtrak for the summer vacation this year, but there wasn’t a local station (despite trains traveling through my town), the times were difficult to plan around and the tickets weren’t much less than flying.
So we stayed home again this year. And from reports, my family and I weren’t the only ones. The term “staycation” has been coined meaning a vacation spent at home enjoying what you can find locally. This can be a great thing, but it could also isolate us as we lose our ability to quickly travel large distances at a low cost.
This is where transit can be so beneficial for the United States. We need a national rail system. There I said it. We need Amtrak to be nationwide what it is in the Northeast Corridor. We need a high-speed regional rail system around every major population center in the country — Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas. And we need to make it happen soon.
What we need is the game-changing investment into rail that happened with the creation of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Notice that last little part? The Interstate System was built upon military defense backing. Interestingly enough Eisenhower was inspired by the German autobahn and how it was a necessary component for national defense. Now we are looking at Germany’s rail network with longing as Eisenhower once did with the autobahn.
It’s time we made rail as much of a priority and make staycations mean going anywhere within the United States cheaply again.
Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,