The Baltimore tunnel is the nineteenth-century rail tunnel that John Kiriakou identifies as the concrete obstacle behind an abstract American complaint: the absence of high-speed rail on the northeast corridor.
The constraint
Asked about California’s abandoned high-speed rail project, Kiriakou answered from the opposite coast. Washington has Amtrak service to New York and Boston, “but it’s it’s slow slow slow. And the reason it’s slow is is crazy, because there’s a tunnel just north of Baltimore that was built in 1850. And if we went to high speed rail, the tunnels too narrow to accommodate a high speed rail train. And so the trains have to fit through that tunnel. It’s it’s the craziest thing.”[1]
The comparison
Kiriakou set the constraint against what other countries manage. “Why don’t we have high speed rail between, let’s say, Boston and New York and Washington, or New York and Chicago, or New York and Atlanta or Miami or whatever, we should have one, the Chinese get all this high speed train. Why don’t we have any of it?”[2]
He added a pricing complaint alongside the engineering one: “And why does it cost me $300 to take the train to New York and back and $200 to fly to New York and back? That doesn’t make any sense.”[2]
What he thinks it amounts to
Offered the explanation that fewer people ride than fly, Kiriakou preferred a different one — a public-private partnership between major corporations and the government that permits gouging “because you’re you’re still gonna pay, you still have to get to work.”[2]
He went on to compare a Chinese man stripped of his transit pass by the social credit system, whose two-hour commute became fourteen, with the American version of the same trap: falling behind on a payment, entering a debt spiral, losing the ability to register a vehicle, and watching a twenty-five-minute drive become a four-hour bus ride. “We think that that we don’t face the same challenges that so many other people in the world do and and we do. It doesn’t matter how wealthy of a country we are. Oftentimes, the deck is still stacked.”[2]