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The Obama Administration made an exciting announcement today regarding Obama's vision for a new era of high-speed rail for U.S. travelers. Obama's Strategic Plan will rebuild existing rail infrastructure and develop a comprehensive high-speed intercity passenger rail network through a long-term commitment at both the federal and state levels. This plan draws from successful highway and aviation development models with a 21st century solution that focuses on clean, energy-efficient rail transportation.
The plan will use $8 billion provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (PDF) and $1 billion a year for five years requested in the federal budget as a down payment to jump-start the passenger rail system and set the direction of transportation policy for the future. The strategic plan will be followed by detailed guidance for state and local applicants. By late summer, the Federal Railroad Administration will begin awarding the first round of grants.
The California Corridor will connect the following cities: San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland), Sacramento, Merced, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Anaheim, and San Diego.
President Obama’s vision for high-speed rail mirrors that of President Eisenhower, the father of the Interstate highway system, which revolutionized the way Americans traveled. "A major new high-speed rail line will generate many thousands of construction jobs over several years, as well as permanent jobs for rail employees and increased economic activity in the destinations these trains serve. High-speed rail is long-overdue, and this plan lets American travelers know that they are not doomed to a future of long lines at the airports or jammed cars on the highways," Obama said.
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Nothing to Vegas or Reno?
It would be nice to have a high speed train to Reno.
Only problem... the current California Zephyr is plagued with delays since they use shared tracks with the big freight train companies.
HSR to Reno is pretty much impossible - to run fast the tracks have to be straight, which ain't easy over mountain passes.
Japan would do it. They would just build a huge number of deep bored tunnels.
Good, because right now we have passenger rail system that would embarrass Bulgaria.
I look forward to riding one of these trains in about 30 years. Better late than never!
It will take awhile, true. But it has to start somewhere, sometime. Now is as good as any.
Great news for California. Hopefully these federal grants will offset some of the borrowing laid out in Prop 1A.
Too bad they didn't do it in 1975. Definitely better late than never.
Great idea, I just wish more of the $870 Billion stimulus was going to these types of projects rather than pork projects.
Biggest boondoggle of all time, last I heard it would cost take at least $800 is subsidies per passenger trip, and that's if it could be built *now* at current prices.
Why can't we just get decent normal-speed passenger rail service up and down the central valley? Or even BART extensions, which would cost much less and carry far more passenger mails?
Of course this is an area that has spent $50 million for a bike lane on the SF Oakland Bay Bridge that maybe 50 people a day will use. And maybe $150 to $300 million more to retrofit the western span for the additional 50 or so daily commuters that would use the entire span.
And maybe $150 to $300 million more to retrofit the western span for the additional 50 or so daily commuters that would use the entire span.
They are retrofitting the span because it is deemed unsafe, not because its ugly, or could use a few more cars.
The $150 to $300 million is the estimated cost of the bike lane alone: This article says $100 million though - just for the bike lane:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/10/16/MN12442.DTL
I can't find the original sfgate article that quoted 150-300. There is a million-dollar plus survey just approved to study the matter.
Yeah, while Reno might have problems a train between LA and Vegas seems like a no-brainer. It's popular as a weekend trip and it falls right into the distance that's a bit too far for driving to be a good idea, but too short to fly. Plus once you get to Vegas do you really need to have a car? It's an obvious route with little to nothing in the middle so it could easily run between the two destinations non-stop.
It looks... promising, but there are far too many little gaps that look like they ought to be plugged.
Why, for instance, are we not connected to the North? The whole East Coast is on one line, but Texas, Florida, and Chicago's networks remain left out though there are a number of obvious places where a short link would connect them into it.
The big problem is that we're still going to stay relatively isolated over here and required to rely on air travel to get over to the East Coast or, well, anywhere other than LA really. It's nice that it's being done and will connect us, but it seems like it's going to be great for the East Coast (which makes sense as they have a lot more cities closer together), but not so great for us. The sparsely populated mountains and plains are going to continue to be the great barrier that they have been since the last transcontinental railroad.
On a related note we really need to also start moving to rail transport instead of truck transport. With containerization there's far less hassle involved in loading/unloading trains and routing their cargo compared to the days of boxcars where taking a car in and out of the train was a huge ordeal. Instead of having tons of individual trucks carrying smaller loads inefficiently, issuing massive quantities of pollution and putting a lot of wear on roads we could have trains deliver between larger regions and cut trucks down to being a last-mile solution to get goods from rail hubs to smaller towns and make deliveries.
Long-haul trucking is even a bigger problem than passenger transit. We need to look into fixing both of them.
Blah.
WAY too many "corridors" in too many congressional districts to get any real HSR built.
never happen
whatever, i'm choosing to be excited about this.