A view from outside on high-speed trains, budgets for them via the Guardian.co.uk

Obama's budgets and bullet trains | Gabrielle Gurley | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Budgets and bullet trains

Obama's plan to introduce high-speed rail to the US is revolutionary – but the funding is far short of what is needed
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* Gabrielle Gurley
*
o Gabrielle Gurley
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 May 2009 18.00 BST
o Article history

Travelling on the train à grand vitesse, or high-speed train, from Paris to Marseille is like living life on fast-forward. Studying scenery at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour can induce a killer headache. American window gazers don't need painkillers, however, since Acela, Amtrak's sole high-speed rail line, glides through the Northeast Corridor at a comparatively Zen-like pace.

High-speed trains on the Boston to Washington link, the system's busiest, only reach their top speeds of 150 miles per hour on a few straightaways in the northern section of a twisting route dotted with antiquated rail technology. The French trip over a slightly longer distance takes about three hours. The American trek, more than six and a half.

There is nothing grand about the vitesse of US intercity trains. That makes President Barack Obama's $13bn plan to introduce an international standard of high-speed rail travel on the country's 10 most heavily travelled routes nothing short of revolutionary. It's been widely touted as doing for trains what Dwight Eisenhower did for interstate highway system. If Obama can pull it off, the Philadelphia Inquirer editorialised, "he would be both magician and miracle worker."

Jump-starting shovel-ready rail projects in the name of economic recovery does sound magical and miraculous – until you read the fine print. The $8bn in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds is "only a down payment on a longer term passenger rail development strategy". A second component of the plan relies on a grant-based proposal in the president's 2010 budget that would parcel out $1bn over five years to worthy projects.

We know the president is no stranger to the vision thing, but who is doing the math? This is one of the best quick fixes for rail in recent years, but a long-term transportation strategy doesn't get and keep momentum based on the political vagaries of grants, annual appropriations and emergency funding. To understand how avoiding future financial and political objectives can cripple country's transportation aspirations, look no further than Amtrak.

Long subject to the prevailing ideological winds, the agency's funding has been anything but reliable. Amtrak has a history of steep operating losses and depends on its federal subsidy for survival. Consequently, the public transportation haters in the Bush administration made sure every appropriation request turned into a battle royal and tried to eliminate the agency twice.

The money Amtrak has received has gone primarily to operations and maintenance on the flagship Northeast Corridor route, not future planning. Only last year did Bush capitulate and double funding to $13bn over five years. How about new revenues dedicated to public transportation? If a hike in the federal gas tax to help shore up highways is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill, you can bet a similar idea would be, too. Yet in the world of public finance, five years is just around the corner. What comes next is a mystery.

The construction costs for a nationwide network are daunting. State-of-the-art trains and track demands tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, which renders the Obama package paltrier still. Last November, California voters approved $10m in bonds to help finance the down payment on the estimated $45bn-and-counting San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed line project. Those costs are just one piece of the pie. Operating and maintenance expenses are two areas that usually get glossed over when the vision is the thing.

States are not any better situated to pony up their share. The administration plan wisely waives non-federal matching fund requirements for stimulus funds. With the massive cost-cutting in education, health and human services and other essential areas going on in state capitols, Washington may have a difficult time convincing many of those lawmakers that they should factor high-speed rail into their long-term fiscal calculations.

Voters tend to agree. Worried about mounting costs, Florida voters put the kibosh on a statewide high-speed rail in a 2004 referendum, just four years after they passed a constitutional amendment supporting intercity links.

And how should the Obama administration separate winners from losers? Should $4bn go to California, which has been working for more than a decade on its 800-mile long project? Some state officials seem to think so. Florida would beg to differ, thank you very much. The Sunshine State wants try again to link Orlando, Tampa and Miami. An initial Orlando-Tampa segment is estimated at more than $2bn. New Englanders would like about $1bn, please, to re-establish rail connections from New Haven, Connecticut to Springfield, Massachusetts and beyond.

What Obama is really asking Americans to do is embrace a new transportation culture that gets people out of cars and planes and into fast trains running from city A to city B. With heightened public awareness of climate change, volatile fuel prices and gridlock in the skies and on the highways, he might be able to cultivate a new sense of urgency.

But moving a tax-adverse country toward this vision demands a massive attitude shift. Down payments may look good, but Americans have had trouble paying off balances. With other pricey domestic headaches like healthcare looming large on his fast-moving agenda, how much political capital is Obama is willing to spend to get America into training?