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 in 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.

I would call train utopia.

Ideally, I enter the train station, maybe five minutes before the train departs.

You can buy an advance and reserve a seat.

If you're with a friend, you can reserve seats together.

Amtrak 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, trains are going to be very frequent, and

the reason is that the Northeast Carter is enormous.

How many people live there?

...