This article from Stateline.org, by Daniel C. Vock – reports on how stimulus dollars come up short when actually building and improving high-speed rail travel.
The last time intercity passenger trains served Madison, Wisconsin’s capital city, students at the University of Wisconsin campus there were protesting the Vietnam War. The trains stopped running when Amtrak took over passenger service around the country in 1971. But last month, the federal government announced it would give the state $810 million in stimulus money to return passenger trains to Wisconsin’s second-biggest city for the first time in more than four decades.
The January announcement clears the way for a new passenger route between Madison and Milwaukee starting in 2013. It will take that long to rebuild track, renovate old stations and build new ones, roll out satellite navigation technology to prevent collisions and even determine who will run the trains. At first, passengers will reach top speeds of 79 mph – the same as today’s Amtrak trains – until new trains that can reach 110 mph go into service in 2016.
(The U.S. government classifies “high-speed rail” as trains that reach 110 mph, which is half as fast as many bullet trains in Europe and Asia.)
The $8 billion in federal stimulus money billed as “high-speed rail” funding that will pay for the Wisconsin improvements is going to 31 states to improve service on trains of all speeds. But as even the straightforward case of Wisconsin shows, the path for states to actually build high-speed rail promises to be long, costly and, in some cases, politically contentious.
“These investments have several goals,” Vice President Joe Biden told a Tampa crowd while announcing the grants in January. “First, to improve existing rail lines to make train service faster, more reliable; two, to pull cars off the road, reducing congestion, cutting pollution and increasing productivity; and three, to begin to develop new corridors for high-speed trains that will go from 169 to 230 miles an hour.”
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explained, on his blog, that upgrading existing rail lines was an important step in developing high-speed rail. “We’ve made awards to states to improve existing track, repair tunnels and bridges and increase the speeds of lines already serving passengers,” he wrote. “We can’t just put faster trains on old tracks and send them across bridges that need repairs.”
For advocates of high-speed rail, the inclusion of so much money in last year’s stimulus bill was a major shot in the arm. States that hoped to build faster train networks spent years drawing up blueprints, assessing environmental impacts, testing new technologies and straightening short lengths of track. But without federal money, those ambitious plans were stuck on the drawing board.
The passage of the stimulus bill last year, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, marked the first time the federal government put any major money behind high-speed rail.
Read the entire article here.
