Andy Kunz knows what makes a city great. After all, he has degrees in fine arts and urban design and a background in landscape architecture and urban planning.
But it took a more whimsical, or you could say magical, experience during his childhood to draw him toward his passion, high-speed rail: It was the 1971 opening of Walt Disney World near Orlando.
"When Disney first opened, it was all about this future city, Epcot. It wasn't an amusement park. It was going to be a future city with monorails and all this cool transportation," Kunz said. "Here I am, a young kid totally sucked in by that, and all the Disney brochures had that little picture of the future city of Epcot on the back. And so I grew up with this super excitement about the future of monorails and all these cool trains that we were going to have."
Over the years, Kunz has come to believe that great cities have great rail systems. In 2009, he founded the US High Speed Rail Association, an advocacy group working to advance fast rail in America. Its vision: a 17,000- mile national high-speed rail network.