As Ray LaHood, the Secretary of Transportation says: “cars are the least efficient method of travel”, and last week the Obama Administration backed that up by investing $8 billion in high speed rail.

The money will be divided between 31 states and the disenfranchised District of Columbia to pursue high speed trains that will connect corridors and move cars off the road.

Some notable lines from our forward-looking Secretary of Transportation:

“I am very proud of what our transportation infrastructure helps us achieve every day… But it’s not good enough. It’s the infrastructure of a previous century, one with plentiful energy and no sense of the role carbon emissions play in our health and the health of our planet. And it’s not adequate for the growth of our nation’s population, its commerce, its mobility.

We need an expansive, safe and energy efficient rail transportation network. We need to generate economic development. We need to reposition our infrastructure for the 21st century.”

He cites the benefits of investing in rail:

• High-speed rail travel offers competitive door-to-door trip times
• It reduces congestion on key routes between cities
• It reduces transportation emissions
• And, most of all, it creates the jobs of the future, the jobs America needs right now

It’s about time America wakes up to realize that mass transit in all forms is the way of the future and that we need to begin moving out of our cars and more quickly into trains, buses, onto bicycles, and our legs.

Nice work, Mr. Secretary, let’s keep going in this smart direction.