One lasting way to make air travel safer
Truly high-speed rail between D.C. and NYC would solve multiple problems

The deadly crash between a military helicopter and passenger airplane this week near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport highlights the fact that air traffic over the airport far exceeds its capacity. This problem will only get worse. The solution is to create alternative travel options for nearly half the travelers who currently fly in and out of National.
The enormous demand for travel between Washington and New York will only grow over time, and National congestion will only grow. To reduce current and future congestion in the air over National the number of flights going in and out of the airport could be limited. That has been proposed in the past, to no avail. Congress has actually gone the opposite direction, authorizing more flights out of DCA in the most recent authorization of the FAA, despite safety concerns.
Given the geographic limitations of the airport’s site along the Potomac River, the airport cannot realistically add more runways. Some traffic can be shifted to Dulles International Airport in Virginia or Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in Maryland, but both of those are quite far out of town, unpopular with some consumers, and could also require expansion to meet additional demand.
The best alternative is to finally build a truly high-speed rail line between Washington and New York. The current Amtrak Acela train service is clearly insufficient for the task. To achieve European or Japanese level high-speed rail service requires a new, dedicated track and equipment. This would be expensive. And it would run into NIMBY problems. But so too would airport expansion in both Washington and New York. There is no free lunch.
The advantages for travelers of a high-speed rail option are demonstrable.
The distance between Washington and New York is roughly the same as the distance between Paris and Brussels, depending on the route. High-speed rail travel between Paris and Brussels takes a little more than an hour and a half.
The fastest an Acela can get to New York from D.C. is two hours and 45 minutes. If the travel time between Washington and New York by train could be cut by an hour, it would be getting pretty close to the fastest air flight time from D.C. to New York of one hour and 16 minutes. But that would come with the added advantage that a traveler would be going between downtown Washington and downtown New York as opposed to traveling between airports, which at least in the case of New York is more than a half an hour outside of Manhattan.
Once high-speed rail has been constructed the U.S. government could do what the French government has done and refuse to license flights between cities where there is available rail travel that is as fast or faster than flying — with the added advantage that such limitation would create fewer carbon emissions.
If travel between Washington and New York could be transferred from flights to high-speed trains, this would dramatically reduce flight congestion at the airport and help National accommodate what will inevitably be growing demand to fly to other parts of the country in the years ahead.
Once the Washington to New York high-speed rail line is in place, the next line to be built could be New York to Boston. Acela currently takes three and a half hours. By comparison, in Europe the distance between Paris and Amsterdam is 85 miles further but takes usually about three hours and 20 minutes.
To put the case in another way, Washingtonians get to New York in the same amount of time that Parisians get to Amsterdam even though the distance these Europeans travel is almost a third longer.
The case for high-speed rail among Washington, New York and Boston has been made repeatedly. The tragedy over National is a sobering reminder that the need to finally build such a system is not just about cost and political opposition; it is about saving lives.
Growing congestion in the air is inevitable and almost ensures that another accident will happen at some point because air traffic controllers and crash avoidance technologies are not infallible.
If President Donald Trump and his supporters really want to “Make America Great Again,” he could start by leaving a legacy of a great high-speed rail connection between Washington and New York. The French have such a rail system, as do the Japanese and the Chinese.
Does he think Americans deserve anything less? Or does he think we are incapable of it?
Bruce Stokes is a nonresident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.