There’s stuff happening, mostly talk for now but maybe there will be more.
A robust passenger rail system has long been seen as a pipe dream in car-dependent Texas.
But a glut of federal dollars for rail projects and a growing realization that road expansions won’t ease chronic congestion on the state’s busiest highways have some Texas officials and policymakers flirting once more with the idea of expanded passenger rail.
“It’s like the perfect storm forming because 20 years ago if we talked about passenger rail in Texas, it would fall on deaf ears,” said Peter LeCody, who heads the organization Texas Rail Advocates.
Congress set aside $66 billion in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to advance rail projects across the country. That pot of funds has rekindled interest in exploring how to boost conventional passenger rail between Texas’ major urban areas and anticipate the transportation needs of the state’s booming population.
Texas has added hundreds of thousands of new residents in recent years, and the state’s population is projected to grow from 30 million people to 47 million by 2050. Without some form of reliable passenger rail between the cities, officials fear car dependence will grow and congestion will only get worse.
“The alternative is to condemn Americans to evermore crowded interstates, to condemn taxpayers to just paying for ever-widening of highways and potentially using evermore crowded airports,” Andy Byford, senior vice president of high-speed rail development at Amtrak, told reporters earlier this year.
At the epicenter of rail ambitions in Texas is the 10-year-old and embattled high-speed rail project between Dallas and Houston. The company behind the project, Texas Central, has long promised to ferry passengers between the two cities at speeds north of 200 miles per hour, which would pare down a 3.5-hour commute by automobile to a 90-minute ride by train car. The project lost steam for a time amid a leadership exodus and problems securing the land needed to build the system but Amtrak resurrected the plan last year.
Amtrak officials consider the route ideal for high-speed rail. It would connect two of the country’s largest metropolitan regions, which haven’t had any form of passenger rail between them since Amtrak shuttered a Dallas-Houston route in 1995. And it would run through relatively flat land, allowing the train to reach top speeds and travelers to bypass congestion on Interstate 45. What’s more, Amtrak officials believe the route could be the cornerstone for a potential national expansion of high-speed rail.
But while Texas’ chances of getting rail to connect its biggest cities are higher than they’ve been in years, lingering skepticism at the state level and local disagreements could still imperil the projects.
The Texas Department of Transportation recently obtained two federal grants to study how to boost passenger rail service on an existing Amtrak route from Houston to San Antonio and, in an effort separate from the Texas Central high-speed project, see if a conventional rail line between Houston and Dallas can be reinstated.
The agency wrote in the applications that increased congestion has made “highway travel unreliable” and boosting intercity passenger rail would remove hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year off Texas highways, easing congestion and hopefully traffic deaths. Expanding passenger rail would also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, TxDOT noted.
The Amtrak connection between Houston and San Antonio has come up a couple of times recently. Other lines mentioned besides the Texas Central line from Houston to Dallas in partnership with Amtrak include the Dallas-Fort Worth route and the once-again-revived Austin-San Antonio Lone Star Rail. The D-FW one is the closest to actual construction, which isn’t saying much. There remain plenty of hurdles, like the entrenched opposition to the Texas Central line and the need to buy a lot more land to make it feasible, plus the Legislature’s extreme unwillingness to spend money on anything that isn’t more highways. That said, the fact that TxDOT even applied for these grants is something. The utopia goal of a high-speed rail network is still out there, it’s just going to take a lot more work to make it happen.