Venture Concept No.2

The venture I am proposing involves the creation of an advanced and accessible transnational railway system in the United States.

            The opportunity that corresponds with this service involves the under-met needs of travel and transit within our country. Since the mid-1900s, American people have obtained an extremely valuable asset and resource – free time. For much of human history, this wasn’t an attainable concept for the majority of people. However, in developed nations such as ours, with a large middle class, free time is something that a lot of people now hold. The advent of free time has come in unison with a movement that our society has made within the past few decades towards societal homogenization through technology. People have the ability to access information and establish communication with other people all over the world, let alone just all over the United States. There is a part of this conglomeration of changes that has not developed as quickly, and this is where the opportunity that I have chosen to focus on comes into play. Ultimately, people have the capacity to invest time outside of their work and daily obligations towards leisure and experience. Additionally, they also have the capacity to digitally familiarize themselves with other people and places far away from them. However, there is not a mode of transit that can match the level that these other capacities have reached and allow for the physical connection to be integrated into this framework.

            A railway transit system is not radically innovative in terms of technological advancement. Trains have existed since the industrial revolution, and we have numerous local railway systems that exist within our country which already assist people, but these are exclusive to large metropolitan areas. There have also been larger railway systems that connected some greater distances within our country, but these have been neglected and cannot come close to satisfying the needs of passenger travel today. This is why my proposed venture is incrementally innovative. A new and improved railway system takes advantage of the potential that already exists within our country’s infrastructure – but this potential has not been properly exploited up to this point in time. Furthermore, a majority of other developed countries around the world already have vast, state-of-the-art railway systems that connect their people in ways the US does not. Therefore, the technology already exists and the necessary knowledge and experience are already available, but it has not been applied to our country. Public transportation, and particularly mass transit, is also a step in the right direction and future development projects should be focusing on the development of these types of systems. One of the biggest reasons for this being sustainability, which is a topic that has acquired a lot of focus in recent years because it has undoubtedly become necessary for our society to consider what our current consumption habits mean for the future.

            The two primary modes of domestic transportation in our country are cars and planes. Cars have been a particular staple in American culture, but automobile transit doesn’t fulfill the needs of people today as it did decades ago. In regards to long-distance travel, traveling by car is incredibly time-consuming. For example, a trip from Gainesville to San Diego, by car, would take about 30 hours of straight driving. Traveling this distance in this amount of time was revolutionary about a century ago, but today this is nowhere near the expectations of consumers. This led to the popularity of air travel. Sticking with the same example, flying from Gainesville to San Diego would only be about 7 hours; but, this comes at the cost of at least 500 dollars. Thus, there must be an opportunity that exists in the median between these two extremes. There is potential for a travel option that is less time consuming than car travel but cheaper than air travel. I believe that railway transit would fulfill this niche, and it would be attractive for a large sector of society today. However, there are numerous requirements of this theoretical system that would need to be fulfilled for it to properly satisfy customer needs. Accessibility in regards to location is a large factor in this theoretical system. The US has largely built its infrastructure around cars, so we effectively created a disjointed and spread out population. However, the point of this system is not to make cars obsolete, rather to reduce their usage by providing access points that can be reached quickly. Advanced technology is also a requirement for a system like this because American consumers expect high safety, hygiene, and comfort standards from travel resources. Ultimately, these are just some of the big factors that would require a business model for this service to be very large and consist of multiple different branches. Departments devoted to logistics, engineering, construction, hospitality, and more would work in conjunction with localized workforces that would contribute to the foundation of a system of this size. This would likely result in a company with more than 100,000 workers.

            My venture wouldn’t exist on a traditional commercial market because this proposal is on this much bigger scale as a service to the greater public. If my company were to own the actual railway infrastructure that would be necessary for a transit system, then it likely could not be imitated because the barrier to entry would just be too large. However, this results in the next step for this theoretical venture being very difficult – constructing new railway infrastructure and connecting existing infrastructure where possible. The possibilities of this venture coming to fruition are very impactful though, despite the large obstacles that a project of this size would face. After the many years that it would take to build and establish the system, I believe that the impacts will be incredibly apparent. Giving people the power to move is a huge asset to both economic and cultural growth and this project would allow that to happen.