President Obama made a splash in Florida last month when he announced the award of federal stimulus money to start building a high-speed rail (HSR) line between Tampa and Orlando. “I’m excited. I’m going to come back down here and ride it,” he told a cheering audience at a town hall meeting.
The president certainly got it right when he said that we must break our dependence on the automobile and imported oil. Safe, reliable, and incredibly fast rail promises a breakthrough that people will be willing to pay for and private investors willing to operate. Passenger trains cruising at 150 miles per hour provide a decisive margin of superiority over highway travel and can compete effectively with commercial air in short- and medium-distance markets while cutting overall fuel consumption and greenhouse gases.
But for all the hype surrounding the president’s announcement, this exciting new mode of transportation won’t be arriving in America anytime soon unless the Obama administration and Congress make some “course corrections.” The crux of the problem is that the administration has begun a major civic work without laying down engineering and design protocols that match the standards of fast train lines built elsewhere in the world. Even worse, the distribution of funds from the stimulus package ensures that the most promising projects will remain underfunded.
Defining High-Speed Rail
One thing that’s been little understood by policy makers and the public is that HSR trains operate quite differently from conventional Amtrak trains. First and foremost, they cannot share tracks with much slower freight trains and must be walled off in their own protected corridors. They can climb steeper gradients than regular trains, allowing them to “hug” the landscape and minimize noise and environmental impacts. But in order to maintain top speeds, the lines they travel on must be built with the fewest possible curves. And where curves are unavoidable, they must use larger turning circles to change direction.
Trains running at more than 150 mph need to be far more powerful than conventional trains and use overhead electric lines for power rather than diesel engines. Trainsets are lightweight and based on aerodynamic designs that make for quicker acceleration and more economical braking.
A regular diesel-powered train running on track shared with freight trains is not high-speed rail. It never will be. It cannot and will not compete with highways and commercial air because it is stuck on a 19th-century right-of-way filled with curves and narrow clearances that reflect a period when trains ran no faster than 60 mph. And yet such projects, designated as “Emerging HSR” by the Obama administration, got far too much of the HSR stimulus pot last month.
A Smarter HSR Strategy Is Needed
Of the 29 rail projects that shared $8 billion in Recovery Act stimulus funds, only two – the Tampa-Orlando proposal in Florida and a projected San Diego-Sacramento line in California – qualify as high-speed rail by international standards. The rest can most accurately be called “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time performance rail.”
The best of these projects, a $1.1 billion upgrade of the existing rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, will eventually permit Amtrak trains to achieve 110-mph maximums and 70-mph averages between the two cities. That’s far below the 150-mph standard set by the European Union. Several other corridor projects funded last month won’t even reach 100-mph speed maximums because they are limited by the curves and congestion on track they share with freight railroads.
The Florida and California proposals that we believed should have served as templates for an emerging HSR program got far fewer funds than they deserved. Both proposals call for lightweight, electrically propelled trains on dedicated guideways running at 150 to 220 mph. Each state got enough stimulus money ($1.25 billion for Florida and $2.25 billion for California) to begin construction, but without any assurance that a working segment can be finished and placed in revenue service. This is a big problem that needs to be remedied.
The Recovery Act provided the first-ever direct federal funds for passenger rail improvements outside of the Northeast Corridor. Responsibility for the program was handed to the Federal Railroad Administration, a small branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) that deals primarily with railway safety. There was no precedent for what it had been tasked to do by President Obama. Awarding high-speed passenger projects was a new responsibility for which the agency was largely unprepared and unequipped.
Because it lacked personnel with backgrounds in HSR, the FRA fell back on what it knew best – conventional railway operations – to evaluate grant applications from the states. And the state applications were mostly dusted-off commuter-rail or incremental Amtrak projects, because most state DOTs have no more experience in executing HSR projects than the federal government.
Out of this confluence of modest state applications chasing humble FRA guidelines came a welter of small-scale upgrades – fixing signal systems here and adding a new siding there – that collectively do little to advance a new mode of intercity travel in America.
We have to do better. Minor upgrades of low-speed freight systems will give government critics a perfect target to paint HSR as a “runaway spending train” (as the Wall Street Journal dubbed it) that benefits only a small group of people. If the public’s current enthusiasm for HSR turns into disappointment, there will be little political support for the expenditure of hundreds of billions needed to construct real high-speed networks.
Getting it Right
To rectify this situation, we make the following policy recommendations to the administration and Congress:
- use the $2.5 billion that Congress has authorized for HSR in 2010 to fully fund the Tampa-Orlando project and provide enough aid to the California project so that a segment of the system can be operational by 2015.
- provide HSR funds only to projects that feature a dedicated, electric-powered system operating at 150 mph or higher. Adopt international standards for HSR design and construction to guarantee the highest-quality engineering.
- define upgraded rail corridors as “CSR,” or conventional-speed rail, which could be funded by a separate aid program.
- develop a sustained source for both HSR and CSR funding, such as a national infrastructure bank advocated by PPI, to ensure a regular and predicable source of funds outside of annual congressional appropriations.
- set up a Federal HSR Administration, distinct from the FRA and comparable in staff and technical expertise to the Federal Highway Administration. An agency with a specified infrastructure-building mandate is necessary to move the program forward.
- locate high-speed rail lines, wherever feasible, along highway corridors instead of privately owned freight railroads. The Florida HSR line will use an alignment alongside I-4 between Tampa and Orlando. In other areas, interstates pass through land that is often owned by the federal government, so land-acquisition costs are minimal.
- encourage the private sector to invest in HSR-building by offering real-estate opportunities along the rights-of-way, such as reserving land near HSR terminals for companies that help underwrite rail projects.
- open HSR train and station services to bids from private contractors to enhance the revenue stream from ticket sales.
- encourage domestic manufacture of HSR cars and locomotives through well-targeted tax credits and “green” credits.
Moving Forward
There is no doubt that President Obama is committed to upgrading intercity passenger rail. But last month his administration failed to exert optimal leadership by spreading federal stimulus funds far and wide rather than concentrating on two or three corridors that would give us trains equal to those in Europe and China.
No one said that building a passenger rail network worthy of the 21st century would be easy or cheap. But neither was the transcontinental railroad nor the interstate highway system that transformed overland travel in America in the past. Each required a bold vision accompanied by smart planning, perseverance, and sustained financial support.
The administration’s current plans for HSR represent a welcome change from the neglect of years past. But unless improvements to our HSR strategy are made, we risk squandering the renewed momentum for building a true high-speed network.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mujitra/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Amtrak, Barack Obama, California, Federal Railroad Administration, Florida, high-speed rail, Infrastructure, Innovation, Railroads, stimulus, Transportation, Transportation Department
Sir -
The ideal location for “HSR” is on former abandon railroad right-of-ways (“ROW”).
They can be pieced together to form a continuous through route between major bus-
iness and population centers. Further, where the original “ROW” have been sold and
or diverted to other uses then yoy build an overhead bridge, the modern managers
of today’s freight railroads refer to them as “fly-overs”.
Looking at a “HSR” operation between Chicago, IL and Cleveland, OH it would run
as follows:
1. Former “NYC” from downtown Chicago, IL with a new bridge over the Calumet
River and ‘flyovers” to Clark Jct., (CP – 426).
2. Former “PRR” to the east side of Gary then former “NYC(M)” to around McCool,
IN and the former Pumpkin Line of The Wabash.
3. East into Western OH through Montipler, OH and into Toledo, OH, piggybacking
on the former Toledo Terminal Railroad to the east side where a connection is
made with the former Norwalk Branch of the former “NYC(W) eats to the
west side of Cleveland, OH where the “HSR”, like the French SNCF “HSR” trains
piggyback over the freight “ROW” to Clevland Hopkins International Airport and
downtown Terminal Tower Station.
4. This “ROW” is close to eisting population centers, however, with a structured
piece of legislation similar to The Pacific Railroad Act of 1865 similar results can
be achieved for property development – remember “build it and they will come!”
5. As to the Rails to Trails, the verbage in the legislation makes the initial and
prime intent of this Act QUITE CLEAR, i.e., when there is a new rail transportation
need the “ROW” RETURNS to IT ORIGINAL USEAGE.
It was necessary to leave quite a bit out in order to arrive at the intended conclusion.
It was necessary to leave out the fact that devoting the same funding to Express HSR in the Great Lakes and Midwest instead of Emerging HSR corridors would result in roughly 1/5 as many route miles.
It is necessary to leave out the fact that those countries that have adopted a substantial Express HSR corridor system have done so on the background of an effective Intercity Express network already in place, and that the leaders in HSR development in Japan and France were first of all reacting to the fact that mainline express interurban corridors were reaching capacity … while we have many interurban corridors with a ROW for four track that are presently carrying one track with occasional passing sidings.
It is necessary to leave out the fact that in France, the Express HSR services often LEAVE the Express HSR corridor and finish their service on the regular Express Interurban rail network … that network which we no longer possess and which Mark Reutter is complaining about us starting to rebuild.
And its necessary to ignore the fact that the Three Tier strategy pursued by the administration Department of Transport has already seen both chambers of Congress increase the $1b annual appropriation proposed to $4b in the House and $1.2b in the Senate, concluding with $2.5b in conference.
Meanwhile, a policy of simply raising the original Clinton-era 90mph+ threshold to, say, 150mph+, as Mark Reutter is seeming to suggest, would leave the large majority of states fighting over whatever scraps may fall from Amtraks woefully underfunded capital improvements budget.
It is certainly the case that a fire needs to be lit under the FRA in terms of moving on developing a regulatory framework for the 21st century – and indeed, wherever appropriate, adopting the solutions for parts of the problem when an appropriate rule already exists in Europe and elsewhere.
However, he never explains how a Congress where the majority of Senators and Congressmen on EACH side of the aisle have not reason to CARE what happens, is every going to be persuaded to light that fire.
And finally, we only had two Express HSR plans ready to go. The administration funded them for close to all the money they could spend in the next two years.
The plain and simple fact is that without a substantial and long-term source of funding for Express HSR projects already in place, Express HSR systems got all the funding that they could have reasonably expected from an Economic Stimulus package. Devoting more of the Stimulus funds to California and Florida now would have most likely backfired, reducing their opportunities to get funding when it comes time, in California, to start the more expensive grade separation projects in 2013 and 2014, and in Florida, when the time comes to extend the Tampa/Orlando corridor down south to Miami.
I’m with Bruce.
Reutter’s “expert” opinion flies in the face of what the vast majority of experts say.
This post, and the one from before the grant announcements ignore too many facts.
-Many of these “slow” projects are necessary work to have faster trains in the future.
-The 150 mph standard set by other nations is a top speed, not an average speed. Few HSR journeys have average speeds above 150 mph. This apples to oranges comparison is misleading.
-In many parts of the country 19th century rights of way are capable of supporting 150 mph speeds with further infrastructure investments.
-Many competing nations have built successful HSR systems by first starting with upgrades to existing lines (Germany for instance).
In my opinion, Reutter’s words are almost as counter-productive as the gadgetbahn-inspired confusion that has stalled so much transportation progress our this nation.
(http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gadgetbahn)
I agree with the comments. Any improvements to the passenger rail system must be consistent with a reasonaBLY predicted final system. Such a final system will have many portions that do not allow the full l50 mph speed. Thus, there will emerge a mix of somewhat high speed and full high speed routes. Eventually, as the most likely high speed routes are built, additioinal ,lesser priority routes could be added. Remember, the interstate highway system has been in construction for 55 years and is still being tinkered with.
Loving obama’s passion but I’m doubtful this initiative will help the economy at all during this next year. I know i’m pessimistic, but I think there is a lot more bad to come before we see the economy recover.