With great fanfare the U.S. Transportation Secretary this week reallocated nearly $800 million to projects furthering the President’s high speed rail goals for the Northeast corridor where Amtrak operates the Acela trains between Washington DC and Boston. The seemingly heady sum was part of $2 billion in federal funding, which had been rejected earlier this year by Republican governors in Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio for similar projects.
Now to most intelligent readers, $800 million sounds like an enormous contribution, which will help transform popular Acela trains, which now average about 80 miles an hour, into Japanese style bullet trains or something akin to the Eurostar line which takes riders from London to Paris in just over two hours.
Think again. Amtrak released a study late last year that put the cost of implementing a true high speed rail program into perspective for all of us. Just for the DC to Boston route alone, the report budgets a total of $120 billion for constructing a true high speed rail line—that is where trains would run upwards of 200 miles an hour like they do throughout Europe and Asia today. That’s $120 billion, not $2 billion or $800 million or even the $8 billion in stimulus money the President allocated to high speed rail projects nationwide in 2009.
So maybe those Republican governors were not so foolish to turn their backs on those federal funds. Probably they were right about concerns that they would be saddled with additional costs for half-baked projects that had no chance for realization especially in the country’s current budget-busted condition.
Incredibly, it appears the U.S. has no chance to make any meaningful progress on the high speed rail front, probably for decades to come. Japan has had high speed rail since 1964. Its vaunted and still highly-praised systems have been surpassed by France, Germany, Italy and now China, which is in the middle of a 10,000-mile building spree connecting its major cities. Here in the great U.S.A., we abandoned passenger rail in most regions of the country back in the 1950s placing all our bets on the interstate system and the car. Without right of ways through major metro areas, the cost for building out systems here has become prohibitive and would be highly disruptive to many neighborhoods.
At least, the $800 million budgeted for the Northeast rail system will allow for badly needed repairs to aging tracks and increasingly dilapidated tunnels and bridges. Much-less than high speed trains will be able to go faster and the chances for systemic breakdowns lowered substantially. Fix-it first projects on the country’s infrastructure are actually much higher priorities for averting economic dislocation than building fancy, headline grabbing new projects. Our highways, transit lines and water systems need vast infusions of repair monies that we just cannot afford right now. In the meantime, this essential infrastructure becomes more obsolete, inefficient, and in danger of breakdown with potentially momentous costs when failures do occur.
As for high speed rail, ignore the hype. It’s just not happening.
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Jonathan D. Miller
A marketing communication strategist who turned to real estate analysis, Jonathan D. Miller is a foremost interpreter of 21st citistate futures – cities and suburbs alike – seen through the lens of lifestyles and market realities. For more than 20 years (1992-2013), Miller authored Emerging Trends in Real Estate, the leading commercial real estate industry outlook report, published annually by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). He has lectures frequently on trends in real estate, including the future of America's major 24-hour urban centers and sprawling suburbs. He also has been author of ULI’s annual forecasts on infrastructure and its What’s Next? series of forecasts. On a weekly basis, he writes the Trendczar blog for GlobeStreet.com, the real estate news website. Outside his published forecasting work, Miller is a prominent communications/institutional investor-marketing strategist and partner in Miller Ryan LLC, helping corporate clients develop and execute branding and communications programs. He led the re-branding of GMAC Commercial Mortgage to Capmark Financial Group Inc. and he was part of the management team that helped build Equitable Real Estate Investment Management, Inc. (subsequently Lend Lease Real Estate Investments, Inc.) into the leading real estate advisor to pension funds and other real institutional investors. He joined the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S. in 1981, moving to Equitable Real Estate in 1984 as head of Corporate/Marketing Communications. In the 1980's he managed relations for several of the country's most prominent real estate developments including New York's Trump Tower and the Equitable Center. Earlier in his career, Miller was a reporter for Gannett Newspapers. He is a member of the Citistates Group and a board member of NYC Outward Bound Schools and the Center for Employment Opportunities.
