How will $8 billion speed up passenger rail service?

Analysis: With yesterday's announcement by President Barack Obama of $8 billion in Federal grants for passenger rail projects in 31 states, talk is already beginning to circulate of the start of an era of railroad-building to rival the Interstate Highway System's construction from the 1950s to the 1970s. If this is so, then it's an exceedingly small first step on a journey of thousands of miles involving hundreds of billions of dollars.

While the lion's share of the funding will go to three large projects that, if and when completed, will produce true high speed rail corridors with potential for traffic and development benefits, much of the rest of it either provides only token or initial support for more involved projects or goes towards projects that won't result in high speed rail service at all.

An example from the first category is the $60 million to the state of Maryland for initial work in preparation for a critical project on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, replacement of the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel south of Baltimore's Penn Station. The 136-year-old tunnel's engineering limits Amtrak trains to extremely slow speeds and forms a bottleneck on what is currently the only true high speed rail line in the United States. While the $60 million is needed to perform engineering work and prepare environmental impact statements, it is a mere fraction of the more than $1 billion estimated cost of replacing the tunnel.

An example from the second is the $400 million awarded to the State of Ohio for restoration of passenger service in the so-called "3C" corridor - Cleveland to Cincinnati via Columbus. Trains on this route will run no faster than 79 mph because it will lack the technology required for faster operation, thus making it uncompetitive with auto travel between the cities.

Perhaps the most positive features of the process that produced these grants are that the grants are being awarded directly to the states and that the states must demonstrate their own fiscal commitment to the projects being funded. Furthermore, most of the grants funding high-speed (125+ mph) or near-high-speed (110+ mph) projects are going towards projects that are at least defensible in theory, even if advocates can quibble over certain specific choices.

But the program's chief defect is the same one that keeps Amtrak from being more cost-effective: the need to spread the money more or less uniformly around the country. High speed rail makes economic sense only in highly urbanized corridors where large cities are close together; such corridors in the United States lie almost exclusively on the two coasts and around the Great Lakes. And not all of these corridors make equal sense: some argue, for example, that high speed rail service in California would work from San Diego to Los Angeles but not from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Meanwhile, funds that could be used to bring near-high-speed trains across the high-speed threshold -- for instance, in Pennsylvania's "Keystone Corridor" between Philadelphia and Harrisburg -- will go instead to bring slower trains to other areas.

Still, while it may be too small relative to the ultimate cost and spread too thinly, at least it is a first step.

Written by Sandy Smith
For HULIQ.com

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