Welcome to Wednesday! Amtrak fan Cameron Peters here, excited to talk about today's story: high-speed rail. Specifically, why doesn't the US have it? And will we ever manage to build it? The team behind Vox's Explain It to Me podcast investigated for their latest episode, which you can listen to here. Today, we're spotlighting a conversation Explain It to Me host Jonquilyn Hill had with the New York Times's Michael Kimmelman for the episode. It offers a few explanations and a glimmer of hope, and you can read it below: |
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Kevin Carter/Getty Images |
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| Jonquilyn Hill How'd we end up falling behind in passenger rail? |
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| Michael Kimmelman The story is usually told that we once had a great rail system. The country was connected by the transcontinental railway in the 19th century. And we gave up that advantage. Once the automobile became something that people could afford, and it wasn't just for rich people, people wanted roads, so we invested less and less in trains. That's part of the story, but there are a lot of other reasons why we failed too, which is that we've become a country that's extremely regulated and that has made it very difficult to build anything big anymore. We have a million obstacles to progress and very few easy paths. |
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| Jonquilyn Hill Who is getting high-speed rail right? |
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| Michael Kimmelman China has built nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail just in the past couple of decades. Japan, of course, has a famous high-speed bullet train called the Shinkansen and has had that for decades. And most of western Europe is connected by high-speed rail. It's perfectly normal in Europe to go to your local train station and get on a train that will take you 200 miles an hour to another city. |
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| Jonquilyn Hill We were supposed to have high-speed rail in the US. What happened to that project out in California that was supposed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco? |
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| Michael Kimmelman Back in the 1980s, Gov. Jerry Brown had this idea that California could use high-speed rail. By the 1990s, California had a plan in place. It took them until 2008 to approve a measure that set aside about $10 billion to construct a high-speed rail, which was going to connect LA and San Francisco. It would take about two hours and 40 minutes to get directly from one city to the other, the cost estimate was around $33 billion, and the completion date was 2020. But by 2018, it was clear this was never going to happen. The cost estimates more than doubled, and they would ultimately triple. When Gavin Newsom, the current governor, succeeded Brown, he spoke about the fact that this was obviously not going to be possible anytime soon. And his big promise was that possibly California might have high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities in the Central Valley that no one had really asked for high-speed rail to travel between. Now, that's pretty unlikely too. The estimated completion date would be sometime in the 2030s perhaps, and at a cost of well over $110 billion. |
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| Jonquilyn Hill That's California. Is there high-speed rail in other parts of the country? |
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| Michael Kimmelman Florida's a good example. Brightline is a privately owned and operated rail line that runs between Miami and Orlando, on what used to be freight line tracks. In short, they didn't have to go through a million of these approval processes to get it done because they kind of already owned the route. California to Vegas is the plan for Brightline 2. It's not just that you have a private investor as opposed to a government; it's also that you have a given route which presents itself that makes economic sense and makes sense for consumers. As a consequence, that may actually happen. And that might be in fact the first genuine high-speed rail in the United States. The safety record of Brightline in Florida is really troubling. Partly it's growing pains transitioning from a freight rail to a passenger train that runs through the middle of cities, but the company bears a lot of the blame. It's clearly a crisis and a learning curve for the company and those Florida communities. |
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| Jonquilyn Hill How hopeful are you about the future of high-speed rail in the US? |
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| Michael Kimmelman I think it is a possibility. The fact that we're having conversations around our inability to get big things done is actually not the same as the conversations we were having five or 10 years ago. You see some signs of that change in California; for instance, the repeal of some of the environmental regulations that have been weaponized to prevent things like high-speed rail, and other things which actually are environmentally good. I'm not entirely pessimistic about this. High-speed rail is something that could connect large cities. And those cities could really use it, and that will serve many, many millions of Americans. |
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⮕ Keep tabs A grim anniversary: Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, writes Vox's Joshua Keating, policy planners are thinking seriously about the possibility of "limited" nuclear war. Pure cinema: Vox's video team investigates how independent movie theaters are finding ways to thrive even as some big theater chains struggle.
Down the rabbit hole: What happens if you reply to one of those sketchy job offer texts from a fake recruiter? Slate investigated. [Slate]
Do you remember? How Sabrina Carpenter's Lollapalooza performance with Earth, Wind & Fire came together on short notice. [Vulture] |
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| The deal with Trump's deals |
President Donald Trump's been cutting trade deals left and right, saying they're the key to unlocking an era of economic prosperity. New data does not back him up. |
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A fun fact for your day from Merriam-Webster: Did you know that the noun "waffle" (the food) and the verb "waffle" (to be indecisive) aren't connected etymologically? They have separate origins in Old English and English, respectively. |
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Today's edition was produced and edited by me, staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading! |
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