An interesting thing happened at work yesterday. For the past week, we've had a coworker from one of our offices in India visiting, making trips to several clients while he was here. Yesterday we found out that he needed to get to the Dells area to visit a client the next day. Someone from our Madison office said he would take him to the Dells, so all we had to do was get him to Madison this morning.

Of course, everyone joked, "Let's put him on the high speed train!". And then we started looking to see what our options were.

For $129 round trip, he could have flown from Milwaukee to Madison, but the flight times weren't ideal, and he'd still have to get to the airport and back. What about taking a regular low speed train? Surely if they want to put a high speed train in, there must currently be an Amtrak run going to Madison, right? If you go to the Amtrak website, and say you'd like to go from Milwaukee to Madison, it will first put you on a train to Union Station in Chicago, and then they'll put you on a bus from Chicago to Madison. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

But what about buses? As Patrick McIlheran points out, there is a very successful bus line that runs from Milwaukee to Madison right now. It's also very flexible, since it doesn't depend on massive infrastructure to support. In fact, there's a pick-up and drop off at various Park and Ride locations in Milwaukee on the way to Madison, including a stop at State Fair Park.

What I found interesting, was there was only one bus line that made the Milwaukee-Madison run... Badger Bus. Wisconsin Coach Lines will go down to Chicago, and Lamers will handle all your needs going up US-41. That surprised me. After all, with all this talk about the need for a high speed rail line to Madison, I was imagining this huge pent up demand for mass transit there. And yet, with all this supposed demand, there is only 1 bus line supporting it?

The liberals reading this will immediately react and say... See, we need a high speed rail line! Or perhaps, the demand isn't there at all... and maybe a single bus line going back and forth is more than enough to support mass transit to Madison... and all these billions of dollars that people want to spend will be an absolute waste. After all, imaging how many buses you can buy with that amount of money!