President Joe Biden is reportedly seeking to revive a project that would construct a high-speed railway from Houston to Dallas in Texas utilizing Japanese bullet trains.
According to a Reuters report on Tuesday, citing unnamed administration sources, the White House is looking to make an announcement on the project following talks between Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington, D.C., this week.
The Japanese government and the White House declined to comment on the report, though the project has seen renewed support from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who told KXAS in Fort Worth on Sunday: “We believe in this.”
Why not do it from NYC to WDC?
California has been trying to build a bullet train from LA to SF for decades. Would love to see them get some help with it.
There’s a lot less stuff in the way in Texas
Because all the politicians from Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey will demand that their cities be included on the stops, and cutting into the efficiency of the whole project.
And all the landowners in between would have to be paid off at market rates for that land, so it’d be much more expensive on that front.
I wish. That would serve the most people, and we clearly want it the most. However, the estimated costs for that were so far into the $100Bs, that you might use $T.
They’re taking a path of continuous improvement so we get slightly better every year, without ridiculously huge project costs. It’s probably not the best way of doing things, but at least we have useable service.
One of the proposed upcoming projects is to re-route Acela inland through Connecticut. While it’s great that the regionals provide service to all those coast towns, there’s just no way of straightening the curves, or raising speeds. If that happens, we’ll see the express on different tracks than regional. It’ll be interesting to see how that works and who screams
Yeah but when someone revisits this in 5 years it will cost more…
I really don’t think cost should come into doing something like this. What’s the cost of NOT doing it? My whole life I’ve heard people along the East Coast wanting it. It’s one of the richest regions and has the one of the predicted greatest benefits in the country. If you are going to start making high speed rail why not make it where it’s useful?
Decades. There are decades worth of improvement projects
Sure, you don’t have to convince me. You probably don’t need to convince most lemmings. But we don’t control the money.
Acela already is successful. It’s in high demand, regularly takes tens of thousand of drivers off the road, greatly reduces airline shuttle flights, and I believe is the only part of Amtrak that is profitable. Imagine what it could do if it could meet demand! Imagine how much more in demand it would be if it were high speed rail!
The current piecemeal approach is probably the least efficient way to do it, plus it will never actually be high speed - it’s merely what the politicians were able to do