A national transportation strategy?

OK, this forum has mostly been about sharing news items so far, but I'd like to get some actual debate going here. So, what do DUers think can be done at the national level to persuade Americans out of their love affair with the automobile and to promote a transportation strategy based around more sustainable forms of transport? Or do you think that it has do be done, piece-by piece, at the local level?

The rise of the automobile as primary transportation came as a result of Eisenhower's federal interstate vision. The space program took off because Kennedy made it a priority. Neither was a hot topic for the average American before it was sold to them.

Alternatively, California and a handful of other states could effect a change in the national perception if they made sustainable transportation options a priority. That approach may take longer but it would be better ignoring the topic or expecting smaller local areas to have much impact on people's attitudes nationally.

Presidential candidates tend to be people who have never had to ride the bus in their lives. Edwards and Kucinich are exceptions to this rule (and among past candidates, Michael Dukakis famously rode the transit system in his native Boston), but neither of them have transportation policies as part of their platform AFAIK.

I have hopes that the existence of this forum might at least plant a seed that will help push the issue into the party's consciousness, but acorns take a long time to grow into oaks.

The problem is, how do change peoples perceptions of train travel?

That piece from the Boston Globe posted in the thread on the Greenbush line did a good job of talking up rail travel, I thought. We could use more articles like that one.

The railways in most of the country are physically in far, far better shape than they were back in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The trouble is that not only has freight traffic increased drastically from what it was back then, but the intercity passenger railroad infrastructure that lingered back then has been torn up.

Yes, I know a lot of track has been torn out. But is there a need for six separate rail routes between Kansas City and Dallas--Fort Worth? Is there a need for at least four separate routes between Chicago and New York?

The more I think about it, the more I think that what is needed is to have high-speed passenger rail on its own separate rights of way--like what the French and the Japanese have done. High speed rail would do wonders for a lot of the medium-sized cities between large metro areas and could readily pinch-hit for the smaller aircraft that serve less-important airports, something not to be sneezed at as the price of jet fuel goes up with the price of oil.

Amtrak's Northeast Corridor survives as like a Perils-of-Pauline heroine, constantly threatened along with the rest of the Amtrak budget by bean-counters and right-wing Fibber-tarian ideologues who want to have Amtrak's hide on their wall. Attempts to promote high-speed rail elsewhere in the US have failed so far; Southwest Airlines helped deep-six a proposal for high-speed rail in Texas and Jeb Bush made it a personal mission to ice a similar proposal in Florida.

It's going to take a lot of guts to take on the highway lobby and the oil companies.

In the 1930's FDR's trust busters broke up the Pullman Company's monopoly on building AND operating sleeping cars. They also prohibited electric utility companies from owning intra-city and intercity trolley car lines. Such practices may have been monopolistic, but the auto-highways-and oil company oligopoly has power that Sam Insull's utility companies never dreamed of.

Mostly, economic forces in the form of things like expensive fuel and the collapse of suburbia.