Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan
CNN story on President Obama unveiling his administration's blueprint for a new national network of high-speed passenger rail lines. Obama says such an investment is necessary to reduce traffic congestion, cut dependence on foreign oil and improve the environment. Highlights from the article:
- The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.
- Highlights potential improvements in the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor running from Washington to Boston, Massachusetts.
- Each of the corridors identified by the president's report are between 100 and 600 miles long. The blueprint envisions some trains traveling at top speeds of over 150 mph.
- The administration has dedicated $1.3 billion in federal funding for Amtrak. The money for the rail service, which carried almost 29 million passengers last year, will go primarily to infrastructure repair and improvement.
2 Comments:
They have talked this to death in Illinois from Chicago to St. Louis. It would cut 1 hour off the train trip. They never mention that all the stops are still going to happen. 4 hours by train or 5 hours by car. You would probably get to where you are going faster by car. Now Chicago to Denver with only a couple stops each in Iowa and Nebraska may be worth looking into
By Unknown, at 6:56 PM, April 16, 2009
Any high speed line needs to be smartly done and worth the economic investment. It's about 300 miles between Chi and StL so it'd be worth having a high speed train if it can make it one way in 2 hours. People would use this service since you could make a day business trip of it and trains are way better than flying for shorter such trips if you ask me. If such a train would take 4 hours to make that leg its usefulness is much less and I would not want to see the government spend a whole lot of money making that happen. Spend that money on high speed corridors that will make a difference.
By Amtrak Track, at 9:31 PM, August 26, 2009
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