peter martin

When I was about nine years old, I wrote a story for my third grade class about a distant utopia on a foreign world. Most of the details of that story have faded from memory, but the one “invention” that gripped my imagination then still has a hold on me now. I wrote about a series of tubes crisscrossing the planet, shuttling people aboard trains that zipped along in airless tubes. I was undoubtedly inspired by Jetsons cartoons and the pneumatic tubes at the local bank that I would watch from the backseat of my mother’s station wagon, and what I’ve learned since then was that it was hardly a new idea: HG Wells wrote of tube connecting New York and London in the late nineteenth century, Robert Goddard’s notes revealed advanced schematics for a “vactrain” tube from about 1910, and Robert Salter of RAND proposed a network in the seventies. More recent references have integrated Maglev technology to eliminate friction with any track.

No track friction with a Maglev base: check. No air resistance in a vacuum-sealed tube: check. Theoretical speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour, allowing travel from New York to LA in under an hour: check. Power from the existing electric grid, allowing it to become progressively greener as plants integrate renewable sources: check. Greatly reduced wait times, lessened security concerns, and optimally located transport hubs in the heart of major cities: check.

So why are we propping up an airline industry that is environmentally unsound, unpleasant and inefficient to travel with, financially unstable, and showing the effects of tightened budgets in its safety record? Or, for that matter, allowing the pathetically antiquated Amtrak to operate a monopoly on the rails?

How about a stimulus for vactrain innovation, an infrastructure project to rival and even trump the construction of the interstate system? A project that would address many of the Obama goals by creating “shovel-ready” construction projects across the nation, make gigantic strides in the efforts to stem global warming by reducing automobile and jet fuel usage, and simplify foreign policy by helping to wean us off of foreign oil dependence. Furthermore, I’m sure someone smarter than me could conceive of a system of municipal and federal bonds that would help stabilize the overall economy, perhaps by tying them to higher taxes on the ultra-rich as a special class of deduction.

But what would I know…I was just a nine-year old dreaming of a utopia, and we’re all well aware that thing are never so simple in real life.