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Even if you love trains, nobody much likes riding the rails from Vancouver to Seattle for business.
The four-hour trip takes twice as long as driving to Seattle. Flying is way faster. And it's murder doing a round-trip business trek in a single day, meaning taking the train is hardly a realistic option for business travel.
But what if you could do that trek, downtown to downtown, in well under three hours each way? Say with two or three Internet-equipped trains running each day that get you to Seattle for breakfast and back home for dinner? Better? Well, that's now a distinct possibility thanks to U.S. President Barack Obama.
In his attempt to stimulate the U.S. economy out of recession, Obama has earmarked $8 billion for 10 high-speed rail corridors around the United States. One of the targets is Amtrak's Cascades line, now linking Vancouver to Seattle and Portland.
It's potentially a game-changing development. We're no longer just talking about slight improvements to this unique Canada-U.S. rail link. The political will now exists in the U.S. for a real push to high-speed train travel in the corridor, much like Amtrak's Acela Express now running between Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.
It's vital that Vancouver, the province, and Canada get aboard. This linkage will further our role in the mega-region, the conglomeration of key cities that will be North America's economic hubs in the 21st century.
Here's how urban theorist Richard Florida frames it: "Worldwide, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings like the Boston-New York-Washington Corridor. In North America, these mega-regions include SunBelt centres like the Char-Lanta Corridor, Northern and Southern California, the Texas Triangle of Houston-San Antonio-Dallas, and Southern Florida's Tampa-Orlando-Miami area; the Pacific Northwest's Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver....
"We need to ensure that key cities and regions continue to circulate people, goods, and ideas quickly and efficiently."
Now, Americans aren't going to hand us any of their $8 billion. But we only represent about 40 kilometres of the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland route. With a much smaller investment -- likely in the tens of millions to start -- we can piggyback on their massive infrastructure project and tie ourselves into the Pacific Northwest, sometimes called Cascadia. If we don't, we'll be in danger of becoming a second-tier player in our mega-region.
But how, in a recession and a time of cutbacks, do Vancouver and the province get the money for such a project? It might be easier than you think -- with the right political pitch.
It goes like this: Canada needs to find future-oriented infrastructure projects to stimulate the Canadian economy, cement U.S.-Canada trade ties and also take cars off the road. Nothing does that better than high-speed rail.
As well, there's the "me-too" argument we can mount in Ottawa. The federal government is considering a Toronto-Montreal high-speed train for central Canada's key mega-region. We can insist a north-south train makes just as much sense on the West Coast -- and will cost substantially less because it would involve fewer kilometres of track upgrading.
There's no better time to begin this argument than this week.
Federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is in Vancouver for his party's convention, trolling for votes. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who prides himself on being a westerner, won't want to be outflanked on this issue, with an election in the wind.
So, all aboard for Obama's Cascadia Express. Its destination is the future.
