High-speed rail in the United States: A golden opportunity
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/122442/high-speed-rail-united-states-opportunity/
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High-speed rail in the United States: A golden opportunity
Raymond Atkins, Terry Hynes and Morgan Lindsay from the Transportation Group at Sidley Austin LLP detail why they believe that private investment is the way forward for high-speed rail in the U.S., but not without government support.
High-speed rail in the United States: A golden opportunity
The current U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, recently shared his vision to see the United States “leading the world when it comes to access to high-speed rail.” Given the current state of passenger rail service in America, achieving that vision will be a Herculean task. America lags far behind Europe and Asia in high-speed rail development – only 33.9 miles (54.6km) of the current U.S. passenger rail network is capable of supporting train speeds in excess of 150mph.
America lags far behind Europe and Asia in high-speed rail development – only 33.9 miles (54.6km) of the current U.S. passenger rail network is capable of supporting train speeds in excess of 150mph.
Secretary Buttigieg is not the first American official to advocate for investment in high-speed passenger rail service. As far back as 1998, the U.S. Transportation Secretary at the time, Rodney Slater, presented a high-speed rail plan and allocated more than $30 million to support state-sponsored high-speed rail projects. In 2009, the then-Transportation Secretary, Ray Lahood, issued a policy paper calling for construction of a high-speed rail network connecting major U.S. cities, and Congress appropriated more than $8 billion for that purpose. Two years later, the Obama Administration announced an ambitious plan to make high-speed rail service available to 80 per cent of Americans within 25 years.
- Getting to the root of the problem
Despite longstanding recognition that the nation’s passenger rail system needs to be modernised, these initiatives failed to gain traction. The reasons why are rooted in geography, technology and government policy decisions dating back to the post-World War Two era.
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The United States is a vast country, stretching more than 3,000 miles from the coast of Maine to southern California. In the 1950s, Congress acted to connect the nation by approving construction of a 41,000-mile interstate highway system. The interstate highway network (which has grown to nearly 50,000 miles) gave rise to America’s love affair with the automobile – the number of registered cars in the United States increased astronomically from 25 million in 1950 to more than 287 million in 2020. The advent of passenger jet travel in the late-1950s created another exciting alternative to intercity travel by train.
The post-war surge in highway and air travel had a devastating impact on America’s passenger trains.
The post-war surge in highway and air travel had a devastating impact on America’s passenger trains. Freight railroads, which were losing business to a burgeoning trucking industry made possible by the new interstate highway network, abandoned their passenger trains in a desperate (and, ultimately, unsuccessful) effort to avoid bankruptcy. Congress responded to this crisis by nationalising passenger rail service in a federally owned railroad, Amtrak. While that policy decision preserved service to communities that otherwise would have lost access to passenger rail, the increasing popularity of automobile and air travel made it impossible for Amtrak to become self-sustaining.
Today, increasing public awareness of the harmful effects of climate change and ever-worsening congestion on America’s highways have created a golden opportunity to ignite a rail renaissance in the United States. High-speed passenger rail has assumed a prominent place in the conversation about how to combat climate change and improve the nation’s transportation infrastructure. American policymakers are at a critical crossroads: how will the nation seek to implement Secretary Buttegieg’s vision for a world-leading high-speed passenger train system?
