How do you want to move forward?
America currently faces five major challenges: climate change, an uncoordinated pandemic response, record unemployment, housing affordability, and systemic inequality. By upgrading our transportation infrastructure to be competitive with other economic powerhouses, we can address these challenges together.
01
Jobs, jobs, and more jobs
Designing and building renewably powered high-speed train tracks, with elevated viaducts, and tunnels can create millions of good-paying union jobs all across the country. There will be long-term maintenance jobs after the tracks are built.
02
Opportunities
Investing in our big, medium, and smaller cities with fast transportation between them incentivizes growth through increased property values, and with greater mobility and foot-traffic, developers and local businesses can expect growth in cities and neighborhoods where a new train station is planned. When more medium and smaller cities are linked to large cities with a quick trip on a train, more affordable housing can become available across the USA.
03
Cleaner and Safer Travel
Americans can breathe easier knowing that they can travel safely on a high-speed train on new dedicated tracks without the hazards of highway traffic. Electrified trains can be powered by renewable energy, so the more we transition the grid to net-zero carbon electricity generation, the cleaner each trip will become.
WHERE YOU CAN GO EVENTUALLY
Potential Destinations
Los Angeles
Califorina
San Francisco
California
Seattle
Washington
Portland
Oregon
Building high-speed rail is good policy
Every dollar the federal, state, or private investors contribute to a high-speed rail corridor, can be expected to return four to nine dollars in economic benefits in the long term. Creating good-paying jobs, increased mobility, greater access to affordable housing, incentivizing commercial and residential development around stations, safer transportation, and reducing carbon emissions is good policy at all levels of government. Like the interstate highways, publicly-managed airports, the USPS, or the military, high-speed rail is a public infrastructural service that can benefit all Americans in a sustainable clean tech economy. There are possibilities for private investment as well, as seen in the UK, and we are seeing develop in Texas, Florida, and Nevada.
Innovative policy development
We help craft better travel experiences and opportunities for Americans by creating innovative private and public policy positions. If you are an elected official or just a wise tax-payer, we catalyze opportunities for non-partisan Public-Private Partnerships for high-speed passenger rail development in the United States. We combine the disciplines of experience design, planning, architecture, graphic design, and social tech to create a branded network that empowers leaders and tax-payers to participate in wise decision-making and negotiations over land-use, carbon-use, and public-private partnerships.
What is high-speed rail?
Electrified trains that travel over top speeds of 150mph are considered high-speed. These trains need to run on dedicated tracks so they have the right of way, and are generally elevated, trenched, or otherwise securely separated from other forms of transportation for safety reasons. High-speed trains in Japan have been running for 60 years without an injury, and France has had a similar safety record for 40 years. Currently 21 nations on four continents have high-speed rail corridors in operation. In 2016, 2 billion passengers rode on a high-speed train. These trains are comfortable, efficient, safe, clean, and a stress-free form of travel.
WHERE IS IT NOW?
Where you can go today
Western, Northern, and Southern Europe
Since 1980, Europe has grown its high-speed rail network extensively across the continent, and more lines are being built, connecting nations in new and exciting ways. 11 European nations have high-speed rail lines currently running, from Spain to Russia, Italy to Sweden, and many nations in between.
Why is there not more of it in the USA?
This is a complicated question, but simply put, there has not been enough federal investment in our infrastructure for too long. Another big problem is that finding the land to build a new corridor is not easy in many states. Lastly, because these trains are electrified, the energy load is not an insignificant addition to our electrical grid. Innovations in locating, designing, and building greater renewable energy generation and storage is needed to support high-speed rail corridors. These challenges can be met if we identify every major and minor city in every state that can see economic benefits from faster, reliable passenger rail to address our current crises, and build better solutions around them for a better America.
What can you do?
• Support candidates that have a plan for building new passenger rail corridors and renewable energy generation and storage innovations. Vote for them.
• Ask your candidates that don’t have plans what they plan to do to create long-term jobs for you, your family, and your neighbors.
• Share our maps with your social networks. Ask friends, family, neighbors and colleagues if they will support these visions with their candidates and elected officials to support additions to the US DOT and Federal Railroad Administration’s designated high-speed rail corridors.
• Tell us where you would like to see a station on our state maps. We will listen to you and revise our maps based on reasonable feedback from our fellow Americans.
What we are doing
We will keep producing maps for all fifty states and publishing them in the months ahead. We are open to media opportunities to explain this vision and how others can get involved in supporting legislation that creates jobs and opportunities for more high-speed rail development.
Based in Washington state, we’re taking a focused interest in following and participating in the discussion around the Cascadia Innovation Corridor between Vancouver, BC, Seattle, and Portland, OR.
We continuously research developments in clean tech energy, and high-speed train technologies, and other innovations around the world, from on-board industrial batteries, to gravity storage towers, tilting bogies, and solar thermal power stations.
We will encourage more Americans to travel overseas on running high-speed trains to experience low-carbon travel for themselves. Visit BlurRail.com to book a trip today!