“With its vote on September 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee ended the rail boosters’ hopes of getting a meaningful appropriation for high-speed rail in the new (FY 2012) fiscal year. It probably also dealt a decisive death blow to President Obama’s loopy goal of ‘giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail,’î writes transportation expert Ken Orski at Innovation Briefs.
And the $100 million the Senate left as a “placeholder” is likely to be zeroed out by the House, Orski notes, effectively killing President Obama’s dream of a high-speed rail network throughout the U.S.
In February, the president asked Congress to appropriate $53 billion through 2018 to provide high-speed rail service. The $100 million is the Democrat-controlled Senate appropriations committee agreed to keep in the budget (by a voice vote) is a drop in the bucket.
“Senate appropriators have done more than merely declare a temporary slowdown in the high-speed rail program. They have effectively given a vote of ‘no confidence’ to President Obama’s signature infrastructure initiative,” Orski says.
“Their posture is understandable,” he added. “After committing $8 billion in stimulus money and an additional $2.5 billion in regular appropriations, the Administration has little to show for in terms of concrete results or accomplishments. Aside from an ongoing project to upgrade track between Chicago and St. Louis (a $1.1 billion venture that promises to offer a mere 48 minute reduction in travel time between those two cities), no significant construction has begun on any of the authorized rail projects.”
And the only really high-speed rail project in the works – a 220 mph, 160-mile, $67 billion bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco – is in trouble because of public opposition (a new poll found that two-thirds of likely voters in California are against it) and the fact that the cost estimates have doubled since 2008.
Orski reports that analysts now believe that the California high-speed rail project cannot and will not be built without a substantial federal subsidy – which is not likely to materialize.
