May I live long enough to see this happen.
The U.S. High Speed Rail Association (USHSR) published a map outlining its proposal for a new 17,000-mile national high-speed rail network across the United States, which it claims will “cut our carbon footprint by epic proportions.”
Under the plan, which the USHSR proposes to build in four stages, it would be possible to travel between Seattle, Washington; San Diego, California; Miami, Florida; and Boston, Massachusetts, entirely on 220-mile-per-hour high-speed rail lines.
The past few years have seen a renaissance in high-speed rail interest across the United States, following decades of little activity. A number of lines are either proposed or under construction. Integrated high-speed rail networks already exist across much of Western Europe, Japan, and China, which, according to Statista, had a 25,000-mile-long network in 2021.
The first stage of the new network proposed by the USHSR would see construction focused around seven regions, including lines connecting Dallas to San Antonio and Houston, Chicago to Minneapolis and Detroit, and New York City to Washington, D.C.
This stage includes the completion of the California High-Speed Rail, a line already under construction that is intended to run between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It also proposes a line linking Las Vegas, Nevada, to Los Angeles, similar to a line currently being built that will connect Las Vegas to southern California.
Also incorporated into this stage are plans to build a new high-speed rail line connecting Houston and Dallas in Texas, which President Biden endorsed in principle in April but has yet to receive full approval. Planning is also underway on a high-speed rail line linking Dallas to Fort Worth, though details remain vague at this stage.
The second stage of the USHSR’s plan would extend the lines built in the first stage, with the northeast corridor line going all the way up to Boston and Charlotte, North Carolina. The Texas line would be extended to the east and north via New Orleans and Nashville, linking up with the network built in the first stage around Chicago.
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Speaking to Newsweek about the plan, Andy Kunz, CEO of the USHSR, said: “The Obama-Biden Administration set a goal of giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years. Such nationwide access remains our goal.”
The last mention I have of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association is back in 2015. There was a lot of train-based optimism in the early days of the Obama presidency, then there was the 2010 election and pretty much everything came to a screeching halt. I can only imagine where things might be if we had started building some of this stuff 15 years ago, but if I go too far down that rabbit hole I will also start thinking about the Universities line and what could have been here, and I don’t need that kind of black cloud today. Suffice it to say that if the USHSR comes anywhere close to that 25-year goal, it will be a miracle and a wonderful accomplishment.
Two additional notes: One, while there’s a Dallas-San Antonio line proposed for Phase 1 of this project, I’m not aware of any serious effort to make it happen as yet. The idea gets noted in the occasional story, but if there’s an actual entity working on it, it has escaped my notice. And two, building a line from Houston to New Orleans makes at least as much sense as Houston to Dallas. Too far to drive comfortably, yet a hassle to fly, whereas a train ride at that speed would make a day trip very doable. If I’m gonna dream about this stuff, I’ll put that on the list.
On a related note, if we are going to try to build some high speed rail, let’s do it right.
In that context, the NYU researchers argue, now is the time to adopt some best practices. For example: Washington should make sure that all American high-speed rail projects are designed with the same standards and equipment, rather than letting each state or company reinvent the rolling stock. With compatible trains, tracks, and wiring, these nascent projects may one day connect to form a national network. States may be laboratories of democracy, but they do not need to be laboratories of high-speed rail technology.
Otherwise we’ll end up repeating the mistake of railroads in the American South, which in 1886 had to move all their tracks three inches closer together to be linked with the more developed northern network. A more modern-day debacle along those lines is CalTrain, which pursued a signaling system at great expense that was incompatible with the future California High-Speed Rail project, which may one day connect San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Standardization has another benefit. Currently, it’s hard for railroads to buy things like trains in the U.S., since the market is too small to support domestic suppliers. The nation’s various high-speed projects could catalyze a domestic industry by all buying the same stuff.
For that to happen, explains Eric Goldwyn, one of the report’s authors, Washington must take the lead on planning American high-speed rail. No other country has built this infrastructure without a coordinated, national approach that can impose standards, supply funding, and concentrate expertise. “We don’t need more maps. That is not our problem,” Goldwyn says. “What we need is someone who has the power to translate map into steel and concrete—a five- and 10-year plan with funding and someone saying what’s happening.”
National leadership could do other things, too, like spearhead workforce development and university programs to deepen the talent pool for HSR development and operations, and forge connections with companies. Who among us had the chance to take High-Speed Rail Engineering in college?
With a bank of rail experts in Washington and universities churning out grads with relevant skills, individual projects could reduce their reliance on consultants and do more work in-house. (This was also a recommendation of a previous Transit Costs Project study about local mass transit.) To take a related example, for the price of one consultant contract to study whether to put trash in garbage bins or not, you could hire 10 in-house experts for four years to create a culture of trash expertise at the heart of local government.
Finally, the report suggests, the U.S. should reform the way big infrastructure projects get planned and permitted—also a hot topic at the moment for transmission lines, solar farms, and wind farms. Most rail projects in the U.S., for example, spend most of their planning phase trying to overcome federal environmental review, rather than paying attention to non-environmental planning basics like relocating underground utilities and buying land. This winds up costing them later, when they need to study everything all over again, and in some cases change plans entirely.
Similarly, fear of litigation can force infrastructure planners to submit more than a dozen detailed routes for some sections in order to show that they have studied all possible alternatives. Imagine the time and expense of doing that for a home improvement project. Now imagine doing it for 300 miles of trains running at 220 miles per hour.
This is the cited report. There’s only one way to get this stuff, and that’s an all-Democratic federal government. (Well, that and federal court reform too, which again as long as I’m dreaming I may as well include.) The 2024 election is about a lot of important things. This is not high on the list of them. But it’s there, and this is how we get it. Take it from there.
Yes please. Train travel is fast, affordable, and humane. Hard to understand the hostility to rail in Texas. It mostly seems to come from people who haven’t used trains.
We have a daughter in Boston and are thinking of living in Massachusetts for part of the year. We’d stay in the Austin area for the other part, where we also have family. I’m most interested in having a place in the towns north of Boston that are on the train line. The Downeaster goes from Boston to Maine and is half-price for seniors.
Wouldn’t it be great for future senior citizens to have this option in Texas?