A long and winding road of an article from the Washington post that I read so that you don’t have to:

“Ask Shannon Valentine how passenger rail rose to the top of Virginia’s transportation priority list and she will take you to the crawling traffic of Interstate 95.

“Gridlock has plagued the highway for decades, endangering the sanity of commuters while threatening the quality of life and economic growth of the region. The addition of high occupancy toll lanes in the past decade increased capacity, yet traffic jams persist.

“Valentine, Virginia’s transportation secretary, said widening is no longer an option for the corridor, which she said averages more than 350,000 people daily. One lane in each direction for 50 miles would cost $12.5 billion, she said, citing a study that looked at possible improvements to a highway that connects the state capital to the nation’s capital.”

Instead of directly explaining how they’ll loosen up this route with trains, the article then goes off on about 73 tangents about how passenger rail is on the way up in Virginia.

But first, where the heck is Virginia? Here is it:

Bumpy on the top, smooth on the bottom.

It stretches right to the edge of Washington DC and already has a few train routes in action, connecting up with the Washington hub in particular, which then connects to the North-East corridor where there are actually semi-high-speed trains running.

Some take-outs from the article:

• In Virginia the push for rail is bipartisan. (Shock to the system)

• “Virginia exemplifies Amtrak’s growth strategy of focusing on adding short-haul trips that compete with car rides and flights in urban corridors.” This is kind-of the strategy in Europe, with the bonus in Europe that countries are starting to ban short flights between A and B when there is a fast train between them.

• “Trains are accessible to nearly 80 percent of Virginia’s population, up from just under 50 percent a decade ago.” I like this trend.

Good work Virginia!

[Cover photo: “An Amtrak train on the rusting Long Bridge crosses over the Mount Vernon Trail in Virginia.” (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)]