Yesterday President Barack Obama unveiled his vision for 21st century high speed rail lines in America-- a massive undertaking to completely revamp a broken rail system that would cost around $13 billion. As cool as the idea of high speed rail is, the question remains as to whether it's profitable and whether it's a good idea.

Europe and many parts of Asia have enjoyed high speed trains for years, while the car-heavy US has let our passenger railroad system falter into a broken and highly inefficient machine. In Europe and Japan, with population densities dwarfing most of the US, modern rail solutions make sense in a landscape with larger urban centers and less reliance on personal automobiles. But in the US, we're going to have to come to that bridge eventually, with population and traffic especially in the northeast corridor causing thousands of hours of lost time in gridlock and large amounts of pollution on clogged highways, there's a part of the high speed rail plan that makes a lot of sense-- it will provide jobs, decrease pollution and increase the job-seeking and travel radius of people in those high density areas who are reluctant to drive through choked streets.

But then there's also the question of "why now?" Why not wait a few years until we're back on our feet financially and then go for the massive rail project? And why not just revamp the current system? The project falls in line with several of Obama's main goals: Providing jobs that can't be exported, decreasing pollution and greenhouse gases and bringing America back up to the same technological and scientific standards as much of the rest of the Western world.

From Obama's speech on the matter:

"What we're talking about is a vision for high-speed rail in America.  Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city.  No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes.  (Laughter.)  Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.  Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.
 
Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future.  It is now.  It is happening right now.  It's been happening for decades.  The problem is it's been happening elsewhere, not here.
 
In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth, remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations.  In Spain, a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined.  China, where service began just two years ago, may have more miles of high-speed rail service than any other country just five years from now.  And Japan, the nation that unveiled the first high-speed rail system, is already at work building the next:  a line that will connect Tokyo with Osaka at speeds of over 300 miles per hour.  So it's being done; it's just not being done here.
 
There's no reason why we can't do this.  This is America.  There's no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders.  Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system –- and everybody stands to benefit."

He also said "our airports are choked on their loads." Your mom choked on my load.

Read more at Business Insider and read the proposal from the White House blog here.