High Speed Rail in the U.S.

[DET63]

This appeared in the Huffington Post back in March, so it may have already been posted here.

Here are a few comments and questions that come to my mind:

• Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio are connected, but the only Houston connection is to New Orleans (and onward to the rest of the country via the Southeast and the Atlantic Seaboard).
  
• The Chicago Hub Network ignores Iowa. Is that wise (especially considering that any candidate for President has to go through Iowa because of its caucuses)?
  
• New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming are completely out of the picture. I can understand leaving out Wyoming (which doesn't even have Amtrak service anymore), but I would think that an intra-state service in Colorado might be desirable, and New Mexico is probably looking at upgrading its Rail Runner service.
  
• Given the modest traffic on The Heartland Flyer, would an Oklahoma City-Dallas-Fort Worth corridor really make that much sense? (Maybe it would, especially if the service were extended north to Tulsa or even Kansas City.)
  
• Isn't HSR in Florida dead? Jeb Bush strongly opposed it, and Floridians even voted it down a few years ago. Has the political climate changed much since then?
  

 

[George Harris]

This map is essentially a compilation of everybody's scheme that has been cooked up over the last 20 plus years. It is a combination of the reasonable and the irrational and local pipe dreams.

1. Someof the lines shown on the California high speed differ from those in the current plan.

2. Iowa was not in the plan for the Chicago "Hub". Maybe they failed to grease the right palms in Chicago.

3. The lines in Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas bear not resemplence to any reasonable plan. I think these are combination of several pipe dreams. There is the old Texas high speed rail scheme that was killed of by Southwest Airlines and the newer "Texas T-Bone", neither of which are on here.

4. There has been some discussion about a Denver-Albuquerque-El Paso line and a couple of other Denver centered lines, but they did not make the map, obviously.

5. Yes HSR in Florida is supposedly dead, but more likely in suspended animation. The previous scheme had been hijacked by a couple of special interests to the point that it deserved to die.

 

[DET63]

I doubt that a Coastal line from San Francisco to L.A. would ever be feasible as a high-speed line. For one thing, it would compete with the inland route. For another, much of the area is very hilly, making construction costs time-consuming and very expensive. Third, much of it would be long or close to the San Andreas Fault, or at least in earthquake country. If and when the "Big One" ever occurs, you could probably kiss the entire HSR line good-bye.

I also don't believe there is any proposal to build a direct HSR from Sacramento to the Bay Area. More cost-effective might be to buy or at least upgrade the Union Pacific line between those two areas to allow faster operation. Perhaps adding a third track for some areas would allow freight and two passenger trains to go through the same area at one time.