Take a trip into the near future with me.

A future where Amtrak service looks less like the slow old system that we all know,

and more like the bullet trains that whisk people across countries like Japan and France.

This is what I think of as normal high-speed rails. New York to Washington and an hour

45, maybe an hour 40. New York, Boston, about the same. New York, Philly should be 40, 45 minutes

apart. That's Alon Levy, who has spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve train service.

Alon is a mathematician by training, but they're working now on something called the Transit

Costs Project at New York University. The project keeps track of how much similar train

projects cost in different countries. And Alon is also an advocate for how American train travel should be,

what I would call train utopia. Ideally, I enter the train station maybe five minutes before

the train departs. You can buy in advance and reserve a seat. If you're with a friend,

you can reserve seats together. Amberg doesn't let

you do it right now. There's lots and lots of capacity, so you don't need to charge really high

prices to avoid the train getting full. Let's say New York and Boston might be $49. The trains are

going to be very frequent, and the reason is that the Northeast corridor is enormous. How many people live there?

It's what, 50 million people between four enormous metropolitan areas. So instead of having to wait

two hours or having to wait an hour, you would be waiting 15 minutes.

What would it cost to realize this travel fantasy on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington?

Well, Alon, the person who spends all day every day running the numbers,

the person who runs a complete database of all the world's train projects and how much they cost,

Alon says $15 billion, maybe $20.

As it happens, Congress is set to give Amtrak $30 billion for the Northeast

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