By Petra Todorovich, Director, America 2050, Regional Plan Association
A savory blend of merit, readiness, and political potency appeared to be the right recipe to win one of the Obama administration's first high-speed rail grants, which were awarded last week after much anticipation. Florida and California were the big winners, and the projects selected in those places possessed elements of this correct blend.
Florida is the best example. It surprised many national observers for winning $1.2 billion for a high-speed rail line between Orlando and Tampa. Why was this project selected? Because compared to other projects, it can be built relatively quickly and cheaply on a public, dedicated right-of-way and flat topography. It's a project that gets you the most "bang for your buck" in terms of early results and helps build the critical public support that will be needed to carry out a long-term federal commitment to a national high-speed rail program. The California project, receiving $2.2 billion, is considerably more expensive, but has the advantage of being the only other true "high-speed" project in the nation and has been in the works for years.
It was a bitter pill for Northeasterners to see the relatively small amount of money they received. If the Obama Administration had selected corridors based on projected ridership demand alone, the Northeast Corridor would of course have been the clear winner. But the Federal Railroad Administration also considered issues like engineering, topography, land acquisition, time to implement, and cost: make-or-break factors in carrying the projects out. Given that the $8 billion appropriation was made as part of the stimulus bill, the imperative was to focus funding where projects can be built sooner rather than later.
Also, the Northeast already has decent intercity rail service, and concentrating grants here would do little to advance and build support for a national program. As discussed in Spotlight in December, the Northeast Corridor was also ineligible for major "corridor" grants because it lacked an up-to-date Environmental Impact Statement. Thus grants made in the Northeast Megaregion ($1.2 billion total) were focused mostly on branch corridors connecting to the Northeast Corridor that which had completed their environmental review, or on state of good repair projects managed by Amtrak. A paltry $112 million was spent on environmental and engineering work that will lead to capacity improvements on the mainline Northeast Corridor.
America 2050's report, Where High-Speed Rail Works Best, released in September, rated corridors in the Northeast, California, and the Midwest as those with the greatest potential ridership demand for high-speed service based on the following criteria: metropolitan population size, economic productivity, existing transit connectivity, auto congestion, length of corridor, and whether the corridor is located in a megaregion. An update to this study, now underway, will take into account aviation data, tourism, projected population growth, and existing density of employment and population around proposed stations. These results will be made available this spring and will help inform the Administration and the public on future funding decisions.
Before the passage of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act in October 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, our country had no federal rail planning capacity or commitment to passenger rail funding. Thus, with the exception of California and the resurrected plan in Florida, there were few existing high-speed rail plans at the time the stimulus bill was passed. Most state applications for this round of funding focused on upgrading existing corridors to reduce conflicts between freight and passenger trains to make passenger service more frequent, to make it more reliable, and to reduce trip times.
Grants made outside of California and Florida will go for these incremental improvements in places like the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, Virginia, Upstate New York, and New England. The Chicago-St. Louis corridor was a particular big winner, receiving $1.1 billion to improve speeds. Is it worth spending money on these types of incremental improvements? I think so. If we can bring more corridors to the level of reliability and service enjoyed in the Northeast Corridor, we can tap into some of the unmet demand for rail passenger service and build support for a federal commitment to a national high-speed rail program. Such a program is essential to laying the framework for mobility and growth in the nation's most populous megaregions for decades to come.
All in all, the Administration's selection of high-speed rail corridors this week represents a critical step toward building the 21st century infrastructure plan our nation needs to accommodate the growth of the 130 million people that will be added to this country by 2050 and a 2½-fold growth of our GDP in that time. Investments in intercity passenger rail - integrated with local and regional transit networks - will provide the armature for the growth of productive, accessible, metropolitan regions and megaregions - something that our largest competitor, China, has already realized. Rail is the best mobility option for serving large concentrations of employment and population in metropolitan regions. These types of concentrations are not just found in Europe and Asia; America's megaregions have density levels comparable to those countries and can be similarly well served by intercity rail. States containing these megaregions, like California and Florida, have realized that high-speed rail is a better option than building more highway lane-miles and airport runways, and that high-speed rail provides economic development benefits and real estate opportunities that the other options do not.
@RegionalPlan
Petra
Yoshiyuki Kasai / Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun
wrote about Japan's High Speed Rail
"Postwar railway development ultimately led to the 1964 inauguration of the Tokaido Shinkansen line. Its tracks, for exclusive use by bullet trains, are protected by solid, endless fences and a special law to mete out criminal punishments to intruders onto the line. No grade crossings exist along the line. Only high-speed electric multiple-unit trains run on the line at speeds of up to 200 kph."
The reason it's not an elevated system is because the cost of building an elevated system would have to be so robust that the cost would be prohibitive.
Talk to me the inventors have a new solution
Ernie Fazio, Communications Director of The Interstates Maglev Project and Maglev 2000
631 757-1698
I totally disagree with your celebration of the government's activities regarding transportation needs. Where are the numbers and who did the math? The current plan is just another piece of show boating when what is really needed is a uniformly applicable system for measuring the number of miles traveled by commuters traveling to and from work throughout the country.
Here on Long Island, most rail lines were built during the mid to late 1800's, well before the area sported a population of over three million. Yet, no attempt has been made to abandon the point to point 'railroad baron' model embraced by our politicians and replace it with a more up to date concept of mass transit and light rail models to better serve their constituents and get them out of their cars.
Having traveled much of the country and seen the massive traffic jams across the country and the haze that envelops even relatively small business centers, I am more than a little amazed that the government continues to play games while our reliance on fossil fuels keeps rising.
Much of required commutation information needed to analyze every area of the country is more than likely available in the form of 1040 zip code information. Every area would receive the same treatment in terms of the evaluation of need and since most of the information is already available and held by the government could be aggregated by a staff of one who could design the programing to cluster the 'to' and 'from' zip code information at the two three and four digit levels and extrapolate the miles traveled by working commuters.
This applies to all 3 articles which are timely and important. The PBS show on Detroit on Feb 8 is relevant here with focus on mass transit and high speed rail. What needs to be emphasized more--and not done enough in Detroit program--is to focus on MANUFACTURING the elements for mass transit (Spain as example). RETOOL DETROIT to lead this - the perfect place to reindustrialize. The horse and buggy gave way to cars. Now is the time for cars to give way to rail.