$10B in Stimulus for High Speed Rail: How Did it Get There and Is it Enough?

4 by Timothy Hurst on March 6, 2009

Map of high-speed rail corridor designations in the United States.

After a recent trip to California, I was reminded what it is like to have a mass transit infrastructure that can take you just about anywhere you want to go. Unfortunately, the U.S. rail infrastructure has withered significantly since its zenith in the early twentieth century, and unlike many of its European and Asian counterparts, it has almost zero high-speed rail service, excluding the Acela Express between Boston and Washington, D.C.

But things might be changing on the rail front, partly because of the machinations of an Obama administration steeped in the loco-centric history of the biggest rail hub in the country - Chicago.

When members of Congress sat down to hammer out the final details on the economic stimulus package, President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel greatly upped the ante for high-speed rail, asking House-Senate negotiators for $10 billion — far more than either bill had allotted. “I put it in there for the president,” Emanuel said. “The president wanted to have a signature issue in the bill, his commitment for the future."

“High-speed rail is the infrastructure bank,” said Emanuel, and the legislation gives Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood discretion to assign “priority to projects that support the development of intercity high-speed rail service.” But parsing those projects out will be no easy task.

Several promising rail corridors are hoping they are recipients of some of that $10 billion, including a high-speed rail project in California connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles.

However, building a high-speed rail infrastructure is much more expensive at this stage in the game than it would have been decades ago, had we been keeping up with the Casey Jones'. And while $10 billion sounds like a lot, the cost of just one of the proposed high-speed rail lines, the 460-mile line connecting New York City, Albany and Buffalo, is estimated at $20 billion to $25 billion.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has 60 days to come up with a strategic plan for the funds.

[Originally published at Red, Green, and Blue]

Martin Engel

It’s not that this is a bad idea. It isn’t. But, it is that there are many far higher priorities that are receiving insufficient attention and support in the domain of transportation and transit. High-speed trains are the icing on the cake of well-developed rail systems in Europe and Japan, which we envy. You don’t start a cake with the icing, as we are in California; that’s nonsense.
Furthermore, and this is my central point, we suffer a severe lack of urban and regional mass transit; hence the crazy traffic problems in every major population center. High-speed trains won’t touch that problem. People need to get to and from work.
To get them out of cars, we need convenient, comprehensive, multi-modal urban and regional transit systems. That’s the first priority for transportation dollars, not a luxury train for the well-to-do.
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