Opponents push differing lessons on high-speed and intercity passenger rail

The presses have been churning following a contentious hearing on high-speed rail before the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure Tuesday, featuring Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and NARP’s own president, Ross Capon. The hearing was titled “The Federal Railroad Administration’s High Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program: Mistakes and Lessons Learned”. Judging from the statements put out following the inquiry, however, the program’s supporters and detractors walked away with an entirely different set of lessons in hand.

[Click here for archived video of the hearing]

On the DOT’s Fast Lane blog, LaHood continued the vociferous defense of the program he initiated in response to animated questioning during the hearing:

Since 1991, Presidents and Congressmen—Republicans as well as Democrats—have had an American high-speed rail network on their agenda, in good economic times and bad. What’s changed today is that we have a President and Vice President who are backing up their words with actions. We’re not just writing reports and filing them away; we’re hiring workers, we’re laying track, and we’re building stations.

…

From here, the future is bright. During the next six months, more than $1.1 billion of new job-creating construction projects will begin. We’ve invested in increasing the Acela’s speed from 135 to 186 miles per hour. We’ve invested in bringing 110 mile-per-hour service to the Midwest. We’ll soon break ground on a new line between Portland and Seattle. We continue planning for a southwest network that connects Dallas to Houston and Oklahoma City.

And we’re committed to helping the people of California achieve their vision for high-speed rail, too. It’s not a cheap project, but it’s an essential one. And we are in it for the long haul.

Over on the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee website, the view from Chairman John Mica (R-FL) was much dimmer:

We’re funding slow-speed projects all over the country, most of them for Amtrak, that will not result in high-speed service. $3.6 billion – more than one-third of the $10.1 billion that has gone to projects – was turned back by states. The one project funded that offered the most hope for achieving high-speed, the California project, appears to be in disarray. In fact, the Committee will hold a hearing specifically to review this project next week.

We need one high-speed rail success, and our country’s best opportunity to achieve high-speed rail is in the Northeast Corridor. Now that federal funding for this program has been stopped, we have an opportunity to learn from those mistakes and make the needed changes to develop at least one truly successful high-speed rail corridor in this country.

Political media outlets seemed split on how to interpret what transpired. Politico’s piece, “High-speed rail has a bad day”, focused on the tongue lashing that House Republicans gave the program, and transposed the hearing with news of a Field poll that claims a majority of Californians would like to see the high-speed rail bond resubmitted to the voters on the 2012 ballot. Streetsblog Capitol Hill and The Hill chose to highlight the back-and-forth between LaHood and critics of the program, with pieces titled “LaHood Defends High-Speed Rail Program At House Hearing” and “LaHood squares off with critics of high-speed rail”, respectively.

Streetsblog captured that interplay nicely with a paragraph on a contentious exchange between LaHood and Representative Bill Shuster (R-PA), who chairs the T&I Subcommittee on Railroads:

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.

Now, to my knowledge, no one is advocating for a 220 mph train between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh in the near-term. Rail advocates—like the Western Pennsylvanians for Passenger Rail, whose efforts we reported on in November—are advocating for a plan to reduce total trip time from 5 hours to 4 hours, and add an additional frequency (from one daily to two), so business travelers could use the service.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that U.S. Airways’ round-trip fare for business travelers from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia will increase by almost 500 percent next year, due to Southwest Airlines’ decision to drop its nonstop service between the two cities. With a few simple upgrades, trains could begin to dominate the air-rail market between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to the extent they do in New York City-Washington, D.C. (69 percent) and New York City-Philadelphia (93 percent). That’s the kind of simple improvements to our transportation network this country should be looking at: a strong business case paired with a low public cost to high public benefit ratio. And with interest rates as low as they are, construction projects can be financed extremely cheaply.

Capon made a similar point in his presentation, using the restoration of the Downeaster service between Portland, Maine and Boston as a case study: although many critics predicted in advance that the train would flop, the service had more than 519,000 riders in fiscal year 2011, up 8.6 percent from 2010.

The limited availability of government funds is an argument for a national rail program. If there the resources aren’t available to fund the $117 billion plan to bring 220 mph service to the Northeast Corridor, or to fund California’s $98 billion Los Angeles-San Francisco corridor, policy makers need to look at how best to use the limited money at their disposal> growing population will need to travel one way or the other, and providing the same level of mobility in the absence of world-class passenger trains will be far more costly than developing our rail network.

NARP President Capon sums it up:

We understand Chairman Mica’s strong support of the development of the Northeast Corridor (NEC). We also support that development both in the Northeast Corridor and elsewhere. Richard Harnish, Executive Director of Midwest High Speed Rail Association and a member of our board, testified before your Railroads Subcommittee on April 20, 2010, “At 220 miles per hour, we can achieve a transformative tipping point where journeys become commutes and business travelers can spend a productive day in a distant city and still be home for dinner.”

[But w]e believe that the HSIPR program must be national, regardless of how few states are currently ready for very high speed trains. Only 18% of the US population lives within 25 miles of an NEC Amtrak station. If the HSIPR program had been focused solely on the NEC, national support for and enthusiasm for the program could not have been sustained and many projects elsewhere would not have been funded. Moreover, the needs of the NEC greatly exceed the totality of the funding that has been provided, thereby limiting the impact the program could have had on the NEC.