America is behind the rest of the western world in many aspects, much of these issues causing turmoil and inequality in our society. It’s easy to identify exciting, flashy issues like healthcare and education, policies that are brutally important in their own right, policies being used as weapons in attempts to push the Overton Window one way or the other, but when these policies become so dramatized and important in the fabric of modern politics, we tend to forget that there are other issues contributing to these inequalities, and more than a handful of issues that need to be fixed in order to better out society. One of the most left behind issues in the modern day, in my opinion, is the issue of public transportation in America. While this might seem silly, a revamp in public transit infrastructure could help fix many things in the US.

Before we address what Public Transportation would fix, we must first address how America is behind in Public Transportation, and why this happened. To make an extensive and multifaceted history of American transportation short, America used to be one of the global leaders in public transportation. We had railroads that spanned across our entire continent, we had winding tracks connecting the smallest cities to major trading hubs, we had a series of interconnected rails that brought Americans together, and unified our society and economy in ways previous unseen. However, with the rise of automobiles and the idea of cars feeding into the “American Spirit” of independence, being able to go wherever you wanted to go whenever you wanted, however you wanted, as well as the fact that American manufacturing boomed from the rise of car manufacturing jobs and the rise of highways lead to a profitable venture of landowners, as well as an increase in infrastructure in underdeveloped forested or mountainous areas in America, the idea of railways being the future began to slowly dwindle until it was seen as almost a joke in the modern day. Meanwhile, we saw countries in Europe, Asia, and now even Africa having developed railways with bullet-trains, high-speed transports that rival any other transportation in efficiency and speed. We saw countries like China, who until the last few decades were relatively disconnected and rural in nature, unite their lands through railways spanning their entire nation. We saw most of the world adopting a much different view of transportation than Americans, with transportation from town to town, city to city, and in cases such as the nations of the EU, country to country almost becoming human rights rather than privileges being locked behind lofty investments of vehicles like in the US. We didn’t fall behind due to a lack of funding, planning, or material, but instead we chose to throw away the infrastructure we already established for new, enticing cars that millionaires such as Henry Ford (who was actually a billionaire) waved in front of the American People, like waving candy in front of a child.

If we were to reinvest in transportation, the most notable benefit would be the cutting back of carbon emissions. With less people taking individual trips in single cars, wasting gas and other precious materials that are polluting our environment, and instead “carpooling” together in public transportation to get to work, home, or simply out for a night on the city every time they leave their houses, the amount of waste and pollution coming from America would be cut back considerably. Following that same logic, the extra bit of walking/biking that this would entail to get to the public transportation would most likely make Americans a bit more healthier, which is currently a huge issue in America in the modern day.

The second biggest solution public transpiration would bring about is reconnecting small towns to big cities. It is well known that small businesses are dying out in Small Town America, commerce usually concentrated in more dense areas between towns or simply leaving rural America altogether due to the increasingly impoverished wealth in those areas. For many people in America, it is simply unsustainable to live in a small town, either due to lack of luxuries, lack of commerce, or simply lack of job opportunity/security/growth. If we were able to have a railway system connecting these smaller towns to the big cities of America, not only would it fuel population growth in these cities by making it possible to live in a small town while still working in a city (imagine being able to take a train from Northeast Pennsylvania to New York City every day in 45 minutes, rather than spending 2 hours to and from each day driving on a highway), but also it would fuel economic growth in these train stops that we saw historically happen before in America, when railways were still prevalent. This would also help the American Middle Class, an economic class currently dying in America who previously thrived in smaller towns as business owners and managers of corporate branches and the likes, jobs and opportunities not really available in America anymore due to the depletion of middle management jobs as corporations began to work around the issue of having a less connected chain of command.

Also, a large infrastructure investment like this would spur a ton of job creation in America! Not only would it produce good paying union jobs as the government began to build up this infrastructure, but the interconnected nation would spur more jobs due to more trade happening from city to city and state to state. While initially costly, the positive affect that it would have on our job market alone would be enough to justify an investment of this kind.

This has been my ramblings of why we should try a “Transcontinental Railroad 2.0” in American (with much better working conditions, of course), which admittedly is a boring subject but one that would help the US immensely in the modern day!