High-speed plan to get US on track

Chicago wants them before 2016 when it hopes to host the Olympics Games. California is ready to start work straight away, even if most of its citizens can't imagine travelling to Chicago, or anywhere else, if it is not by car or plane. New York, Boston and Washington are convinced they have them, but they don't.

This is the frenzy that has been set off by President Barack Obama telling the country it is time to catch up with Europe and Asia, and get serious about high-speed trains.

He is offering an initial pot of US$13 billion ($23 billion) over five years towards what he called "the most sweeping investment in our infrastructure since President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s".

In truth, it is not that much money, which is why transport officials from Oregon to Pennsylvania and many states in between will now scramble to come up with proposals that will win favour in Washington.

Decisions on allocating Obama's money, some of it from the January stimulus programme and the rest from the federal budget, will be madein a few months.

The last five decades since President Eisenhower put the focus on America's roads have been endlessly discouraging for advocates of trains.

Amtrak, which runs a scrappy national network, still has to share most of its tracks with the freight companies, while making do with rolling stock from the 1970s. And while the pride of its fleet are the zippy-looking Acela trains connecting Washington to Boston, congestion and wiggly tracks mean they never meet their high-speed promise, and average a non-zippy 130km/h.

Travel on some Amtrak routes, including those served by the Acela, has jumped recently, in part because of fluctuating fuel costs.

Impatience with road congestion and growing awareness of global warming means Obama's vision of up to 10 regional high-speed rail networks is likely to be politically popular. Encouraging him behind the scenes is Vice-President Joe Biden, a self-confessed railway lover.

Nor did it go unnoticed when Californians on election day last November approved a US$10 billion bond issue for a high-speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But the project has its critics.

"When Eisenhower built the highways, people already had cars and were buying cars at a high rate. It was an expansion of a system with huge pent-up demand," said Adrian Moore, a transport policy expert with the libertarian Reason Foundation in Los Angeles. "There is no huge pent-up demand for rail service; it's more like build and hope."

Critics also note that while high-speed trains are part of everyday life in Europe and Asia, they rely on government subsidies.

Finally, there is concern the US$13 billion will be spread too thinly. Construction of the California line alone is expected to cost as much as US$45 billion.

- INDEPENDENT