PennDot moving quickly on rail stimulus

Saying he wants to do for rail travel what President Dwight D. Eisenhower did for highways, President Obama yesterday announced a plan to spend as much as $13 billion over five years to upgrade passenger rail lines and develop high-speed rail corridors across the country.

The first spending would go states to upgrade and increase speeds on existing intercity lines, where people could quickly be put to work, Obama said. The U.S. Transportation Department is to announce where that money will go before the end of the summer.

Pennsylvania Transportation Secretary Allen Biehler, who attended the president's announcement in Washington, said he would move quickly to identify the best projects for grant funding in the state.

Among the 10 high-speed lines identified for potential funding are Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and its route between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Pennsylvania officials also said they would consider seeking money for existing proposals for new rail service between Philadelphia and Reading and a route linking Scranton with New York City.

Obama said the first $8 billion would come from the $64 billion in the stimulus package for roads, bridges, rail and transit, in what he called "the most sweeping investment in our infrastructure since President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s."

He said he would dedicate another $1 billion each year for the next five years in the federal budget toward rail development.

At a news conference with Vice President Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Obama said that he realized it would be a "long-term project" but that he believed the investment was a good first step toward relieving congestion on roads and in airports, and moving toward a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation.

"My high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America," said Obama. "We must start developing clean, energy-efficient transportation that will define our regions for centuries to come."

The announcement marks a shift in attitude by the White House toward Amtrak, which has struggled for survival since its formation in 1971. Amtrak's budget has been zeroed out in some years by presidents, only to later be restored by Congress.

Amtrak spokesman Clifford Black called the announcement a "significant moment. ... It's a historic partnership between Amtrak and the states for faster and more frequent passenger trains."

Black said the funding would allow improvements such as new or upgraded track and new signals, bridges and overhead wires.

PennDot's Biehler said he would look at the Philadelphia to Pittsburgh "Keystone" corridor, as well as proposed rail lines linking Philadelphia and Reading, and New York and Scranton.

"We will be dusting off studies and seeing which have the greatest merit and see how good a case we can make," said Biehler.

Pennsylvania must compete against projects in six other states that have already received federal approval, according to U.S. transportation officials. That doesn't bother Biehler.

"This is a stepping stone for the future," he said. "We need a shift to give people an alternative to the auto."

Some critics contend that Obama's proposal is doomed to failure because the country is not dense enough, even in the Northeast, to support a costly investment in upgraded rail service.

"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 a huge pent-up demand," said Adrian Moore, a transportation policy expert with the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based libertarian think tank. "There is no huge pent-up demand for rail service; it's more like build and hope someday, miraculously, Americans change their ways and want to ride trains."

Moore said Obama's proposed funding level did not come close to covering the costs for a true national network, citing California's proposed high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles currently budgeted at $50 billion.

He said high-speed lines in Japan, Europe and China – while enjoying far higher ridership than the United States - are still heavily subsidized and he questioned Washington's ability or willingness to pay operations and maintenance costs down the road.

Amtrak's nine-year-old Acela Express between Boston and Washington is the nation's only high-speed service. Its trains are built to reach speeds up to 150 m.p.h., but only average about 80 m.p.h. because of curving tracks and slower-moving freight and passenger trains that share the route.

Citing an example of how improvements can pay off, Black pointed to $145 million that Amtrak and Pennsylvania have spent on the Philadelphia-to-Harrisburg route. With additional trains and trip times trimmed by as much as 25 minutes, ridership has increased by 26 percent in the last two years, state officials say.