Posts about High-speed Rail

The play ran at the Woolly Mammoth theater last year, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Woolly brought it back this year, and since then it's won both the Pulitzer and Helen Hayes awards.

We've arranged a special Greater Greater Washington night on July 28. All tickets to that performance are 15% off if you use the code 1186 when you buy tickets online or on the phone. In addition, we'll have a happy hour in the Woolly's lobby. Everyone who buys a ticket with the code gets $1 off beer or wine. We'll gather starting at 6, and the show begins at 8.

You can also start learning and talking about gentrification even sooner—tonight, in fact. GGW contributor Veronica Davis is participating in a panel, "The Gentrification of Chocolate City—Reality vs. Perception," hosted by the Greater Washington Urban League. It's at 6:45 pm at the NPR building, 635 Massachusetts Ave NW (Metro: Gallery Place).

Tomorrow midday is another interesting panel, "Better Transportation By Design," discussing how design can help create a better high-speed rail program. It's part of the Van Alen Institute's "Life at the Speed of Rail" event announcing winners of a design competition around HSR.

It starts at 12:30 at the National Building Museum, 401 F Street, NW (Metro: Judiciary Square). It's free but RSVPs are requested at rsvp@vanalen.org.

Monday is Arlington's CaBi expansion meeting; if you can't go, you can submit your suggestions for locations.

And don't forget about our Greater Greater Washington trip to the Anacostia Community Museum and Art Gallery on July 10. There's still some room so RSVP here.

All of this, I know, is obvious. But when it comes to rail transportation, this formula has been avoided, especially in the U.S. The owner of railroad tracks usually is also the operator of trains along them. When other operators want to move their own trains in, conflicts typically erupt.

The frequent disagreements about acceptable service levels between national rail operator Amtrak and freight railroads on tracks that the latter owns (and which it isn't very happy to share) are indicative of this problem. But these disagreements are not irreconcilable.

Indeed, an infrastructure owner that is able to arbitrate between competing operators could be more effective in producing efficient service for everyone than might be an owner-operator, which discriminates against other operators.

In this context, last week's revealing of House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica's (R-FL) plan for the Northeast Corridor raises a number of interesting questions. Convinced of the value of private sector competition and promoting a pull-out of the federal government from every public service imaginable, Mr. Mica has submitted a proposal that attempts to re-imagine the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak's flagship route and the nation's most-traveled intercity rail line, as a place where, fundamentally, the rules of the road—but not the railroad—could apply.

The bill (draft text) would force Amtrak to abandon its control of (much of) the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston, handing it over to the Department of Transportation, which in turn would lease it to an "Executive Committee."

Amtrak would have to give up all of its assets and it would lose federal funding. The Committee, in charge of infrastructure and setting pricing policies, would then engage a public-private partnership (PPP) with a private group, which would commit to upgrading the line and then operating trains to offer two-hour trips between New York and Washington and 2h30 between New York and Boston—within ten years, twenty years more quickly than Amtrak has said it would be able to make roughly the same improvements.

Mr. Mica also claims that this could be done at a cheaper price than Amtrak's $117 billion proposal.

Outside of the Northeast, states would have to offer their rail corridors to competitive bidding; current subsidies to Amtrak would simply be redistributed to the winners of those operations bids.

Despite the wide-ranging proposed effects of the bill as summarized, the manner in which any of this would be implemented remains incredibly unclear. How would intercity rail operators interact with the freight and commuter railroads that also use the tracks, in the Northeast and elsewhere? If a PPP were implemented, how much would the government agree to commit to pay for improvements?

Unfortunately, the bill would not provide a realistic way to promote true operational competition. Nor does it would it offer a promise of actual federal support to fund an upgrade of the corridor, which seems unlikely to be sponsored by private entities alone. Most problematic would be the transfer of authority over the line's management to the currently non-existant Executive Committee, whose ability to make decisions about rail properties has yet to be tested, let alone proven.

Fortunately, the proposal is unlikely to make it through the Senate, where Democrats and other Republican supporters of Amtrak are likely to prevent the bill from passing even if it makes it through the House. The American intercity rail system and the governance bodies that oversee it at the federal and state levels are too underdeveloped to be able to guarantee that this semi-privatization wouldn't be a disaster.

But Mr. Mica's bill does articulate a number of policy changes that could play an important role in shoring up passenger service in the Northeast. The status quo, in which Amtrak operates relatively infrequent and slow passenger trains within the nation's most important megaregion, certainly is not ideal. If managed appropriately, the separation of track ownership and line operations could allow for a situation in which multiple operators offer competing services along the same routes, just as Megabus and Bolt Bus compete for the most customers on I-95.

In mainland Europe, E.U. regulations have mandated that national rail companies like France's SNCF or Germany's DB allow other operators (in many cases, SNCF and DB affiliates) to run trains between similar destinations. Though I am not convinced that this will produce universally positive results, it will at least likely result in lower fares for customers on the most heavily trafficked rail corridors.

And focusing on the most-used lines is clearly Mr. Mica's goal; according to the bill, the second-highest stated priority for potential investors are "activities that benefit the greatest number of passengers" (just after safety). Amtrak's current policies do not exactly fit that bill since they are designed to push lower-income individuals (like myself) onto slower and less comfortable intercity buses.

Yet the Mica proposal would not produce true competition in rail operations. It would encourage competition in rail operations contracts. Rather than invest in the infrastructure and then open up the rights to use tracks, the PPP structure as proposed would be a build-operate-maintain system in which one private group would invest in improvements and then have control over operations, which it would perform itself.

Mr. Mica has repeatedly referred to Amtrak as a "Soviet-Style" system because it has a monopoly over its services, but it is hard to see how a PPP extended over a long contract would be any different, except that it would charge even higher prices to make up for the initial cost of capital improvements and—even worse—it would be literally banned from cross-subsidizing other services with the profits, according to the proposed bill. Is this in the public interest?

The biggest question of all, though, is whether Mr. Mica is in complete denial about the extent of either the private sector's ingenuity or their collective willingness to invest in public infrastructure. While it may sound nice, asserting that corporations can rebuild the Northeast Corridor in 10 years at a far lower cost to the taxpayers than Amtrak has proposed could is a stretch. And even a $50 billion upgrade would be larger than any single private investment in infrastructure ever in the U.S. What evidence does Mr. Mica have that a plan like this could move forward?

Cross-posted on The Transport Politic.

As expected, the big winners are the Northeast Corridor and the California high-speed rail project, each of which were given hundreds of millions of dollars. In a little bit of surprise, the Midwest Chicago-hub was also a big winner, with major improvements funded on several corridors.

The Washington region didn't receive any funds directly, although we will benefit from some of the projects to the north and south. The District applied for but did not receive money. Maryland applied for $415 million and received $22 million that will go to planning for a new Susquehanna River bridge.

Ironically, Virginia didn't apply for any money but received some anyway, as part of a North Carolina-led application to perform environmental planning work on proposed upgrades to the Richmond-Raleigh corridor.

The Northeast Corridor will benefit from the $450 million devoted to catenary and signal improvements in central New Jersey. This funding will pay for installation of constant-tension catenary over a 24-mile section of track, raising the top speed from 135 to 160 miles per hour. Other Corridor improvements will result in minor trip time improvements and reduction in bottlenecks.

The complete breakdown of grant recipients is shown in the table below. The acronym "NEPA", which appears a number of times, refers to the National Environmental Policy Act requirement for environmental planning approval of federally-funded projects.

Location	Amount	Purpose
NORTHEAST CORRIDOR
New Jersey	$450m	Power, signal, track, catenary improvements supporting 160mph service.
New York	$295m	Bypass tracks for high-speed trains in NYC area.
Rhode Island	$25m	Bypass tracks for high-speed trains in Kingston area.
Maryland	$22m	Planning & NEPA to replace Susquehanna River bridge.
Rhode Island	$3m	Planning & NEPA for renovations for Providence station.
NORTHEAST (NON-NEC)
New York	$58m	Track, station, signal upgrades to Empire corridor, including replacement of Schenectady station and 4th track at Albany-Rennsselaer station bottleneck.
Pennsylvania	$40m	Track & signal upgrades to Harrisburg-Philadelphia line.
Connecticut	$30m	Double track New Haven-Springfield line.
Mass.-Maine	$21m	Double track Wilmington-Andover line.
New York	$1m	Planning & NEPA for new Rochester station.
MIDWEST
Non-specific	$268m	48 railcars and 7 locomotives for 8 Amtrak corridors in the Midwest.
Michigan	$197m	Track & signal upgrades on Chicagao-Detroit line between Kalamazoo and Dearborn, allowing 110 mph service for 235 miles of corridor.
Illinois	$186m	Track upgrades on Chicago-Saint Louis line between Joliet and Dwight, IL allowing 110 mph service for 220 miles of corridor.
Missouri	$14m	Design for new Mississippi River bridge on Chicago-Saint Louis corridor.
Minnesota	$5m	Planning & NEPA for new 110mph service from Minneapolis to Duluth.
Michigan	$3m	Planning & NEPA for new Ann Arbor station.
SOUTH
Texas	$15m	Planning & NEPA for new Dallas-Houston corridor.
N.C.-Virginia	$4m	NEPA for 110mph upgrades to Richmond-Raleigh corridor.
WEST COAST
California	$300m	20 miles of track construction near Fresno for the 220mph California high speed rail project.
California	$68m	15 railcars and 4 locomotives for existing California Amtrak routes.
Washington	$15m	Track grade separation at the Port of Vancouver, near Portland, OR.
Oregon	$2m	Study of service and capacity needs near Eugene.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

The HSIPR program, created by a 2008 law and capitalized with $8 billion from the 2009 Recovery Act, consists of grants awarded on a competitive basis to states, groups of states, or Amtrak to pay for capital projects aimed at making intercity passenger train service faster, more frequent, more reliable and safer. This includes building new world-class high-speed rail systems, as well as making meaningful upgrades to existing rail infrastructure and equipment to greatly enhance current Amtrak service.

The latter type of investment, often deemed higher-speed rail, is just as important as the former, as it is a cost-effective way of giving more Americans the choice of train travel. This builds the domestic production capacity and the train-riding culture necessary for the U.S. to begin to approach Europe in terms of the energy-efficient choices available to travelers.

The elimination of the program from the 2011 budget unwisely stunts the growth of a program that has already begun to prove its worth.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), which administers HSIPR grants, has been criticized, even by train supporters, for getting money out the door too slowly. Despite that, a recent Government Accountability Office report confirms the agency has moved remarkably fast, given difficult circumstances the agency faces. The FRA's program has only been active for a little over two years, during which time the FRA expanded its mission from safety oversight to grant-making.

America's freight railroads carry most of the nation's passenger trains and coordination with freight schedules proves especially daunting. Even though HSIPR investments usually expand capacity and improve reliability for freight transport, private railroads are wary of agreements that might limit their ability to move a growing volume of cargo. Despite these tough bargaining conditions, four of the six major US freight railroads have already entered into agreements with states and Amtrak to commit to meeting specific passenger train performance standards.

The projects that the FRA has already awarded promise to create over 50,000 jobs and are already stimulating economic development in the communities served. Among these projects are an extension of Amtrak's frequent Boston-Portland, ME Downeaster service to Brunswick, ME, where developers are already investing in a walkable commercial corridor near the Amtrak station that is slated to receive service next year. The railroad supply and construction industry nationwide has enjoyed a significant boost in employment and contracts.

In ignoring these successes in spurring economic growth, Congressional Republicans are misinterpreting the rejection of HSIPR grants by Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida to argue that no state government wants to be "burdened" with the ongoing operation of poorly patronized trains. On the contrary, the vast majority of states are eager for more Federal investment in passenger rail because they see that recent investments are already producing returns.

So far 23 states, DC, and Amtrak submitted applications seeking a total of $10 billion for a piece of the $2.4 billion that FRA will redistribute after Florida rejected it. For every notice of funding availability the FRA issues, the amount applied for has exceeded the amount available by at least a 2 to 1 margin.

Though the high-profile rejections by a few governors make headlines, many more states are eagerly demanding the money because they see passenger rail as a smart investment.

If we are going to meet the 21st-century challenges of population growth and petroleum scarcity, we must dramatically ramp up investment in passenger trains—a transportation method unmatched in capacity, efficiency, safety and comfort.

The National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP), an organization for which I work, has been leading the charge to win the level of investment necessary to put America on track to a more secure, livable, and sustainable future. Please consider asking your Members of Congress to oppose these draconian cuts to high-speed rail programs, transit funding, and upgrades to the Northeast Corridor.

New Gaithersburg Heights: The blogger behind New Columbia Heights moved to Gaithersburg, learned to walk a dog while driving an SUV, and inaugurated a new feature, Chili's of the Day.

We want 3-D! Wheaton residents are outraged that a proposed plaza for Wheaton looks like a Sketchup model, and started a group "3-DIMBY" to push for a more 3-dimensional plan. (JUTP)

Too many ped-on-ped crashes: The New York DOT was alarmed to discover a high frequency of pedestrian-on-pedestrian crashes. Small children even get into such crashes intentionally. Fortunately, there are very few injuries. (Transportation Nation)

Planjokizen: Ben & Jerry's adds a new flavor, Janette Sadik-Pecan ... LA will add car racks to its buses ... After many Republican governors rejected high-speed rail money, Ray LaHood spent the $2.4 billion on a huge party in Las Vegas. (Planetizen)

Public spaces get better: The Project for Public Spaces, which always does great news coverage at the start of April, revealed that Brooklyn's Prospect Park West will new get new kayak lanes, Arlington, Texas will train riders to use ESP to find out when their bus is coming, a new iPhone app helps starchitects not listen to public input, and a newly-unveiled plan would solve New York congestion by replacing most of Manhattan with freeways. Once upon a time, that last one was not a joke.

Top committee Republican James Inhofe is all in favor of a big infrastructure bill, but his brand of support includes limiting the scope of the bill. "Our problem in getting the bill we need to get is really not as much the Democrats as it is the Republicans," he acknowledged. "'Cause I can hear it right now. They will get it to the floor and say, wait a minute, we've got museums in here and these other things."

Later he clarified that "these other things" are "state capitol domes and bike trails," which let loose a flurry of trash-talking about bike trails. "I wasn't aware there were things in the infrastructure bill that aren't real infrastructure," said Raymond Poupore of the National Construction Alliance, who was testifying before the committee. "I always thought it was just highways." And Bill Dorey of the Associated General Contractors of America added, "It's hard for me to defend a bike path."

Inhofe suggested that getting back to a meat-and-potatoes highway bill was the key to Republican support. "The best way I can get the full cooperation of the Republicans is if we took this back to the way it was originally, when we had the highway trust fund and the people who paid to use our highways would confine it to maintenance, new construction, bridges, highways then that would be sellable to the conservative community," he said.

Some Democrats did rush to cyclists' defense. Boxer herself let it be known that "to me, a bike path is a way of transport; a lot of my people use it to get to work."

And Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin "took issue" with Inhofe's dismissal of transportation enhancements. "We need to look at multimodal transportation. Yes, the overwhelming amount of dollars that are reauthorized are going to be for the traditional types of transportation, whether they be roads or bridges or conventional transit. But we need to look at smarter ways," he said. Baltimore's designer, he said, tried to connect communities through greenspace.

We're looking at ways of trying to connect communities again so they don't have to use our roads! So we don't have to build so many roads! To me, that saves money in our transportation! And it's the right investement for our nation. Every dollar that we authorize needs to be spent efficiently and appropriately for transportation in this country. But let us not be afraid to look at alternative ways that can save money, create jobs, and then have more dollars available for the expensive projects that we know we need to build such as high speed rail.

Other Democrats, while not exactly taking up the bike trail issue, declared their love of asphalt. Montana Senator Max Baucus, who chairs the Finance Committee and sits on EPW, celebrated the fact that Montana has more highway miles per capita than any other state. "We love our highways," he said.

Another theme that came up was the possibility of selling infrastructure investment as a jobs bill for veterans. Susan Martinovich of the Nevada DOT and AASHTO said the unemployment crisis in the construction sector hits home for her on a personal level. "My son is a sergeant in the US Marine Corps, recovering from serious wounds," she told the committee. "He and many of his fellow Marines spent time in Afghanistan building infrastructure. Transportation is an industry that could provide jobs for these warriors. And they're jobs that they're skilled to undertake, but they're not assured to be there."

Sen. Boxer was intrigued by the idea. Poupore added that his organization has a Helmets to Hard Hats program that could be a model. Look for more talk of this in the future.

Cross-posted at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.