A year ago, when laying out his vision of fast trains zipping between major cities like they do in Europe and Asia, President Obama invoked the words of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans.”
Last month, Obama’s top rail administrator, Joseph Szabo, was in Chicago touting little plans — and slow trains — at a congressional field hearing about how the administration spent $8 billion in high-speed rail grants.
Trains might travel at or near 200 miles per hour overseas, but such velocity isn’t really necessary in the U.S., Szabo, chief of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said. “There are some that believe that only investments yielding 200-mph service will yield benefits. The facts show otherwise,” he asserted in testimony before a House Transportation and Infrastructure panel.
Instead, he said the FRA “views high-speed and intercity passenger rail service in the context of the transportation markets served and the needs of the passengers rather than as a race to see how fast a piece of equipment can move.”
Such criteria helps explain why the FRA allocated more than half of high-speed rail grants to projects that don’t qualify as high speed by international standards. They include extending conventional Amtrak service from Portland, Maine, north to Brunswick.
Szabo praised Amtrak’s current trains between Boston and Portland as an example of modern service that attracts passengers — a rather breathtaking rewriting of the line’s actual history. Seventy years ago when the Boston & Maine Railway operated the line, trains made the Boston-Portland trip in one hour, 50 minutes. Today, Amtrak takes two hours, 25 minutes — or a third longer — to cover the same ground.
It’s this kind of regress, rather than progress, that has turned America’s once-superb railway system into a marginal operation outside of the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor.
Szabo acted as the cheerleader for other rail grants handed out by his agency, such as $1.1 billion to add sidings and signals between Chicago and St. Louis to increase train speeds to a maximum of 110 mph.
When rolling out his rail plans a year ago, President Obama said that 110 mph was only a first step in attaining the type of fast train networks found in places like France, Spain and China. But a year later, the FRA bureaucracy seems ready to make the “first step” a long-term goal, which will only guarantee that America stays on the slow track behind the rest of the world.
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nfu/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
