Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Stop me if you’ve heard these before:

Stephen Harrod, Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton, quoted in a recent APTA report. Image: APTA

“Most Americans don’t use railroads, they use cars.”

“There’s no better example of excessive government spending than the $53 billion President Obama allocated for high-speed rail in his 2012 budget.”

“Would you pay $1,000 so that someone — probably not you — can ride high-speed trains 58 miles a year?”

“High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher, but without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.”

Critics of federal initiatives to promote high-speed rail have launched these attacks with great frequency over the past few years. Their targets have been projects in Florida, Wisconsin, California, or even federal regulators and Secretary Ray LaHood. But their primary intended audience was the American people, and, according to the American Public Transportation Association, there has been a “well-oiled campaign” (pun probably intended) to make sure their message was repeated, and loudly.

APTA is trying to unplug that propaganda machine with its new “Inventory of the Criticisms of High-Speed Rail With Suggested Responses and Counterpoints” [PDF]. It methodically lists no fewer than 37 specific objections to pursuing high-speed rail (grouped thematically into eight chapters) and exposes them for “lack of veracity and vision.” The four critiques quoted above (the first two from Diana Furchtgott-Roth in the Washington Examiner, the third from CATO’s Randall O’Toole and the last from Thomas Sowell in The Albany Herald), barely scratch the surface of the anti-HSR literature addressed by the report.

The aim of the report is to give HSR supporters a way to return fire when detractors say things like:

• High-speed rail is too expensive and will never be profitable. APTA says the question of profit is “dangerously misleading and irrelevant” since “the economic value generated by passenger transportation historically is captured by the businesses served by the transportation network, not by the carriers.”
• It doesn’t have broad enough support. On the contrary, says APTA: Even the Congressional leaders who have been the most critical of the Obama administration’s allocation of rail funds “have set about finding creative ways of financing the initiative in the hope of encouraging greater private-sector support and leadership.”
• HSR might work elsewhere, but it won’t work in the U.S. Oh really? Sure, intercity passenger rail currently serves “the smallest share of riders among all modes of passenger transportation,” says APTA. But that’s changing. “In the Northeast Corridor, intercity trains enjoy a market share almost equal to the airlines, and nationally, ridership on Amtrak is at an all-time high.”

Many of the debunked criticisms point to some combination of unrecoverable cost and only marginal benefits, with the assumption that taxpayers will be on the hook for costs and that benefits will be confined to a select few. Not so: APTA cites ample evidence that high-speed passenger rail could be capable of operating profits and wide-ranging benefits.

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Amtrak has spent the past year as a sort of punching bag for some members of Congress, not to mention the GOP presidential candidates. So it’s refreshing to hear that they’re coming out swinging, confidently, in 2012.

President and CEO Joseph Boardman announced this morning that Amtrak would pursue an “aggressive” agenda for 2012, including a large-scale equipment upgrade and some much-needed capital improvements to the busy Northeast Corridor [PDF]. Boardman said that fiscal uncertainty would not spell delayed capital investments — as it has in the past — because “customers expect us to get better.” He cited the company’s record ridership – 30.2 million passengers in 2011, the eighth time in the last nine years that Amtrak has set a new ridership record.

Artist's rendering of Siemens' "Amtrak City Sprinter" electric locomotive, the first of which will be built in 2012. Image: Metro Magazine

“I think the culture and organization of this company is changing to where we’re able to make investments,” Boardman said, offering as an example the purchase of 70 new electric locomotives. The purchase illustrates a surprising confidence in the future as the trains were “financed by debt because we were able to show folks we can pay that debt with increases in improved reliability and service.”

The locomotives will replace the entire fleet of electric locomotives currently in use on the Northeast Regional and Keystone Corridor routes, and will be capable of slightly higher speeds with greater reliability.

Long-distance trains will also be getting equipment upgrades in the form of 130 new sleeper, diner, and baggage cars. These will be used on long-distance routes which connect the Northeast Corridor to Montreal, Chicago, and Miami. Boardman pointed out that some of the cars they are replacing, inherited from predecessor railroads, are older than he is.

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The U.S. DOT announced this morning that it’s allocating almost $1.6 billion for repairs to roads and bridges that were damaged in recent floods and storms. If House Republicans had gotten their way, this money would have come out of high-speed rail funds.

Thanks to FHWA, Missouri (and 29 other states) is finally getting some relief from the devastating floods of last year. No thanks to Republicans in Congress, that relief is not coming at the expense of transportation programs that, one day, could prevent such climate events from happening. Photo: Paul Davis / AP

The House voted in July to transfer over a billion dollars of high-speed rail funds over to flood relief, but according to sources at U.S. DOT, “there has been no effort” to tie today’s emergency appropriation to a rescission of high-speed rail funding. Indeed, these dollars came from the omnibus funding bill that passed last month.

U.S. DOT had the chance to spend the money on rail projects quickly enough that by the time they could start on the emergency relief appropriation, the money would have already been spent out. That’s just what happened. So, instead of the $1.028 billion going to the Army Corps of Engineers for relief work, it went to rail projects as intended.

It’s good to see that these essential emergency relief funds were spent without cutting into HSR. Cloaking a partisan attack on a Democratic program in disaster relief was a cynical move by House Republicans.

These communities, from Maine to Montana, never should have had their recovery from 2011′s devastating storms made into a political football. Besides, increasingly extreme weather events are likely tied to the larger trend of climate change. It’s a little short-sighted to apply a band-aid to disaster relief while hobbling development of a transportation mode that could, potentially, reduce climate change and the disasters it causes.

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Intercity rail dreams in the Midwest have certainly seen their share of  setbacks — with federal funds being returned in Ohio, Wisconsin and, more recently, Michigan. But all is far from lost.

Plans for intercity rail that will travel as fast as 110 miles per hour are well underway between Chicago and St. Louis. Photo: Illinois Department of Transportation

Yesterday, U.S. DOT announced a $186 million grant to Illinois DOT to upgrade the line between Chicago and Joilet — about 40 miles southwest of Chicago — one of the final segments to be built in the 284-mile Chicago to St. Louis line.

The project will allow trains to travel up to 110 miles per hour and, when completed, will save travelers about an hour, U.S. DOT reports. That’s good news for the about 35 million people travel the corridor annually. According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, about 90 percent of those trips end at either terminal: St. Louis or Chicago.

Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana are all in the midst of upgrading intercity rail lines as well, although it might not be accurate to describe many of these projects as true high-speed rail. (True HSR runs at an average speed of 110 miles per hour, as opposed to a maximum of 110.)

Michigan has funds for line upgrades between Kalamazoo and Dearborn — just outside Detroit. Meanwhile, Amtrak will be completing the remainder of the Detroit-Chicago link west of Kalamazoo to Chicago. The line will top out at 110 mph, said Richard Harnish, Executive Director of Midwest High Speed Rail Alliance.

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Can you guess who? Image: YouTube

Match the quotation to its Speaker (hint, hint!):

“Let’s go ahead and be really bold, and go head-to-head with the Chinese in developing and implementing maglev trains that move at 280 to 300, 320 miles an hour. [...] You cannot talk about American national security in the long run without a fundamental redevelopment of this country economically… And you cannot talk about a competitive American economy without a dramatically more robust and more modern infrastructure.”

Is it Obama, stumping for reelection? Not this time. What about Mitt Romney, who recently said he’s okay with borrowing money if it’s for infrastructure that provides a revenue stream? Getting closer.

No, these words belong to one Newton Leroy Gingrich, and they were delivered at a June 2009 event co-hosted by Building America’s Future and the National Governors Association. That’s right: Mr. Balanced Budget Amendment, the Deficit Hawk’s Deficit Hawk, wants to build maglev trains, per-mile one of the most expensive modes ever devised.

His speech outlined “8 Principles for a 21st Century Infrastructure System,” and featured: rewriting the budget act to allow for multi-year capital investing (number one), involving and incentivizing the private sector (number four), and an “energy infrastructure investment comparable to transportation investment” (number eight).

This last point, no doubt, refers to the six-word mantra that served as the title of Gingrich’s 2007 book, Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. He also wrote a book – that same year! – called A Contract with the Earth about environmental stewardship. If nothing else, you have to admire his chutzpah. (That, and his skill at delivering focus group-tested talking points that advance the agenda of his patrons in the fossil fuel industry.)

The Republican presidential field’s resident idea man and self-styled “organizer of the pro-civilization activists” has a rather extensive public record when it comes to his stance on transportation investment, one that dates back to his years as Speaker of the House in the 1990s. Not that he’s ever had much to say about urban transit or other transportation issues that touch the daily lives of city dwellers.

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Yesterday, for the second time in as many weeks, the House T&I committee held a hearing on the benefit-versus-boondoggle high-speed rail debate. Last time, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was asked to defend the peppering of high-speed rail grants to projects outside the Northeast Corridor. Yesterday, the topic narrowed to focus just on California’s high-speed rail project, whose recently-drafted business plan [PDF] has revised its total construction cost to $98.5 billion through 2033—up from $43 billion though 2020 just a few short years ago.

The initial operating segment of California HSR has critics worrying about the entire system. Full Image: CHSRA

First to take center stage were the members of the California congressional delegation, whom ranking member Nick Rahall (D-WV) likened to the cast of a reality TV show for “always fighting.” And fight they did: about alignments, the proper location for an initial operating segment, and whether HSR is needed at all.

The committee seemed primarily concerned with three things:

• the choice of the Central Valley as the project’s initial operating segment
• a recent poll showing dwindling public support for the project in its present form, and
• the uncertain availability of funds, given such a dramatic increase in project cost estimates

Regarding the choice of the Bakersfield-to-Fresno initial segment, FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo was unequivocal. “We have a legal and binding obligation to move forward,” he told the committee. “We don’t have the authority to shift these dollars now [to a different segment] and meet the requirements of the law.” He’s right: The FRA, in awarding federal money to CA HSR, is executing its duties set forth in laws like the stimulus act, PRIIA [PDF], and others, passed to permit expansion of passenger rail while SAFETEA-LU stuck around.

Assessing the other two fears – dwindling public support and uncertainty of funds – is less straightforward.

Petra Todorovich, director of the rail advocacy group America 2050, told Streetsblog that she sees the uncertainty of funds as the greater threat. “It adds delay to the project, which is one of the reasons that the recent cost estimates were revised upwards,” she said. “If California can accelerate the project, it will cost less money.” And it’s a vicious cycle: The more the project costs, the less inclined private investors will be to sign on to the project, and the slower the project will be able to proceed.

Both sides agree that the success of the project depends on finding private capital to fill the growing gap in the up-front costs. The business plan (conservatively) predicts an $11 billion investment from the private sector, but even if all $11 billion were to turn up, Rep. Andy Miller (R-MD) expressed his extreme reluctance to ask his constituents in Maryland to help come up with the remaining balance. If that attitude prevails in the belt-tightening House, private sources have even less incentive to invest, and so the cycle continues. In this way, the entire House hearing could be seen as self-fulfilling.

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LaHood is spending his birthday defending the administration's high-speed rail plan. Photo: Christian Science Monitor

It’s Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s birthday, and he’s spending it testifying before the House Transportation Committee. The hearing is on “Mistakes & Lessons Learned” from the high-speed rail program, but — no surprise here — LaHood and House Republicans have differing ideas about what “mistakes” have been made.

Here are some highlights.

Chair John Mica said he’s a “strong, committed advocate to high-speed rail service in the United States” but he’s been “very disappointed” in the progress so far. “We have hit an impasse,” he said.

Mica pointed to the ballooning cost estimates for HSR in California and reiterated his long-held position that it’s the wrong place to build high-speed rail. LaHood agreed that “this is an expensive project, but all of the money is going to American workers to build American infrastructure.” Mica stood firm that the Northeast Corridor, not California, is the place to build.

“We’re taking our cues from you,” LaHood said. “We’re investing in the Northeast Corridor.” Mica said they’re still waiting for the money to be awarded.

Rep. Bill Shuster, who chairs the rail subcommittee, said the president’s vision to bring high-speed rail access to 80 percent of the American people isn’t realistic. He said there’s no money for it — and no need. “I don’t hear people all around the country clamoring for high-speed rail,” he said.

When LaHood said that the HSR vision isn’t “Ray LaHood’s vision” — it comes from the states themselves — Shuster said yes, but his daughter wants a luxury SUV and he don’t have the money for it, so she’s not getting it. “I’m glad you didn’t think that about the Keystone Line,” LaHood shot back. He said Shuster asked for the money for that line and the DOT gave it. “Right,” Shuster said, I believe in rail investment “where it makes sense.” But, Shuster noted, he didn’t ask for help funding rail improvements between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh – and that line goes right through his district. But it’s not a strategic investment priority for the country.

Shuster suggested actually taking money from the California project and putting it toward the NEC — not likely to be a popular suggestion, when federal funding is already just $3.6 billion of California’s $98.5 billion total bill.

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How can you convince Americans that transportation is important enough to invest in?

That’s the question that brought together five former U.S. Transportation Secretaries this week at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Former DOT Chief James Burnley took a swipe at Transportation Enhancements and the stimulus.

James Burnley was deputy secretary and then secretary under President Reagan. He took the position that “75 percent” of the public “gives the thumbs down to paying more for transportation” because we’re giving them the wrong argument about why it matters. He took a jab at President Obama’s stimulus program:

We have to stop treating transportation infrastructure as a short-term jobs program. It didn’t work by any conventional definition of what “working” means. We all knew –those of us who have expertise in the field – it would not work in terms of short-term stimulus.

Because it takes time – it takes years for that money to actually be spent and people to be hired. We need to convince the American people that we need to invest in transportation infrastructure because we need to invest in transportation infrastructure. If we sell that idea – not as a jobs program, but because it affects the ability of our economy to grow over time, our international competitiveness and all the other things that we believe it affects, then we’ve got a fighting shot at convincing the American people that the resources that we believe ought to be devoted to transportation should be devoted to it.

That’s a legitimate point, and Streetsblog has made the same argument – that selling transportation as a jobs program undersells the true value of transportation. But there are a few problems with what Burnley is saying. First, when asked to tax themselves at the local or state level for transportation improvements, 75 percent of voters say yes. So maybe the case isn’t so hard to make after all.

And second, most Republicans – and many Democrats – fault the stimulus for not investing enough in infrastructure. Not quite seven percent of the package was devoted to infrastructure, and many critics say that’s why the stimulus didn’t do more to create jobs. Certainly, the president’s desire for “shovel-ready” projects may have been naïve, which Obama himself has publicly admitted. But Burnley may have been over-simplifying things with his statement.

Meanwhile, Sam Skinner, who served under President George H.W. Bush, argued that too many bridges to nowhere have eroded public confidence. And it’s not just transportation, he said – government mishandling of Medicare and pensions and everything else leads to overall distrust that the government can handle anything at all, despite the fact that the transportation department has proven that it “actually can complete projects under budget and on time.”

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Speaking at a press conference today, Mica backed off plans to privatize Amtrak service in the Northeast. He was joined by New York State Sen. Malcolm Smith and Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler. Photo: Noah Kazis.

House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica backed off his controversial plan to privatize passenger rail on the Northeast Corridor today, announcing at a press conference that reforming Amtrak would suffice.

Mica stood with New York Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler at a conference held by the US High Speed Rail Association to announce further support for true high-speed rail along the Northeast Corridor. Mica has previously singled out the Boston-to-Washington corridor as the only proper location for high-speed rail (in contrast to the Obama Administration’s nationwide approach). Today, he urged that if any more high-speed rail funds are returned to the federal government, they be disbursed to the northeast. “Any further money for high-speed rail needs to go solely to the Northeast Corridor,” he said.

Mica said his goal was to see travel times as fast as in Amtrak’s ambitious proposal, but within a decade, instead of the 30-year timeline Amtrak set out.

Given Mica’s previous support for privatizing the Northeast Corridor, today’s announcement raises questions about how a revitalized push for high-speed rail along the route would be structured. Amtrak will be involved, Mica promised. “If there wasn’t an Amtrak, we’d have to create an Amtrak,” Mica said twice today. “It just needs reform.” He stated that he is no longer asking for the route to be taken away from Amtrak and that he is willing to compromise with other members of Congress and Amtrak leadership.

Even so, Mica still referred to Amtrak as a “Soviet-style train system.” It’s clear that ideological divisions linger.

Nadler, an opponent of privatization, added that there is now widespread agreement that private capital needs to be included in plans for the Northeast — Amtrak itself is seeking private investment — and also agreement that Amtrak will continue to serve the corridor. “If we all agree that Amtrak has to be the main vehicle,” said Nadler, “we have a lot of room to talk and to compromise.” Read more…

Earlier this week, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its new business plan [PDF]. The transportation establishment, the government, and the media issued a collective gasp: $98.5 billion? Thirteen years’ delay?

Making this artist's rendering a reality will cost more than projected. Image: CA High-Speed Rail Authority

It’s true – the price tag has more than doubled. “The good news is the numbers are more realistic; the bad news is they may well be beyond reach,” said Democratic state senator Joe Simitian.

The new estimate for California conservatively includes $16 billion for contingencies and miscellaneous cost increases. Acquiring real estate in California is another big expense — though the authority has cut costs where it could by sharing tracks with commuter rail systems, another move bound to be attacked for its reduced efficiency.

Petra Todorovich of the Regional Plan Association says that much of the cost of building any megaproject in the U.S. is spent mitigating its impact on local communities. “Some of the rises of this project have been costs for tunneling or viaducts,” she said. “Those are expensive measures to reduce the noise and visual impact on local neighborhoods. Are they worth it? They’re certainly worth it to those communities. And they may be the price of building this project.”

Indeed, appeasing residents has been one of the many hurdles the California High-Speed Rail Authority has had to overcome. Another has been criticism of the proposed first segment from Bakersfield to Fresno – “a fast train to nowhere,” as it’s been called. They’re sticking with that plan, but the CHSRA takes pains to say that “each segment of the construction project will have its own value and independent utility.” They predicate each additional segment on the availability of funding but assert that the Central Valley line, in and of itself, would be useful.

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