The New New Deal (50 page)

L
et me ask you a question,” Vice President Biden said.
³⁶³
It was the day after the 2010 State of the Union, and he was warming up a crowd at the University of Tampa. “How can we, the leading nation in the world, be in a position where China, Spain, France, and name-all-the-other-countries have rail systems far superior to ours?”

Amtrak Joe and his boss were in town to announce the Recovery Act’s $8 billion in high-speed rail grants, including $1.25 billion for that Tampa-to-Orlando route that had miraculously united Florida’s politicians. These investments wouldn’t provide much short-term stimulus; the bulk of them wouldn’t be spent until 2011. And they wouldn’t get America anywhere close to name-all-the-other-countries; China was spending forty times as much on its high-speed network. But for a car-crazed nation that spent more on highways in a year than it had spent on intercity passenger rail in four decades, this was real change. It was a down payment on Obama’s goal of creating fuel-efficient alternatives to long drives and short flights—and on Biden’s prediction that Obama would lead “the most train-friendly administration ever.”

As a Chicago resident, Obama probably took more trains in an average
month than Bush took in his life. Rahm Emanuel, the godfather of high-speed rail, was another Chicago guy, as was Obama’s federal railroad administrator, Joe Szabo. To Republican critics, this explained a lot; they saw high-speed rail as cosmopolitan elitism, a Euro-socialist assault on the freedom of the open road. But while the high-speed program did represent an investment in a metropolitan future, an implicit vote for Chicago over Crawford, there were plenty of culturally and politically neutral reasons to like trains. You didn’t have to watch the road, stew in traffic, or pull over to eat, stretch your legs, or buy gas. You didn’t have to risk arrest or accident by drinking or texting. As Obama pointed out in Tampa, you didn’t have to take off your shoes at security.

Anyway, bullet trains felt like the future.

“I mean, those things are
fast
,” Obama said. “They are
smooth
.”

The Tampa–Orlando line would be eighty-four miles, short for a high-speed line, with a top speed of 168 miles per hour, slow compared to the wow machines whipping around Europe and Asia.
³⁶⁴
But it would be a showcase, a project that, if not exactly shovel-ready, was at least plan-ready, unlike any other U.S. bullet train. It could be the proof of concept for high-speed rail in America, producing images of sleek trains shooting past bumper-to-bumper congestion on I-4. It was expected to be profitable, thanks to the Disney stop, and while it wouldn’t be completed until 2015 at the earliest, it was the only bullet train that Obama would have any chance to ride as president.

“You all have a date!” Obama told the crowd. “When that thing is all set up, we’ll come down here and check it out.”

I
rode a train from Miami to Orlando that March. I had a comfortable seat with Shaq-worthy legroom. I avoided the schlep of the airport and the maniacs on the highways. I did some work, ate a passable spinach lasagna, and watched
Funny People
on my laptop; it wasn’t Amtrak’s fault the people weren’t funny. At one point, we stopped in the middle of an old-Florida ranch, beside a majestic oak dripping with Spanish moss, and I thought: There’s no better way to see America.

Unfortunately, for the next half hour, I remained beside that majestic
oak. Door to door, the journey took ten hours for a trip I usually drive in four. My seat cost only $36, but taxis to and from the stations cost twice that. It was a stark reminder why America’s passenger rail system was a laughingstock, and why Obama was pushing an upgrade.

His high-speed rail program awarded $3.5 billion to Florida and California to start building dedicated lines for snazzy new bullet trains. It spread the other $4.5 billion around thirty-one states to repair bridges, straighten tracks, and otherwise upgrade existing Amtrak lines that would still go much slower than bullets but would more consistently go faster than oaks. Once again, the administration was sending a two-part message—somewhat faster trains soon, super-fast trains later. The program’s official (and more accurate) name was High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail. For all the rhetoric about catching Spain with a fleet of ooh-and-aah bullet trains, it was really “higher-speed rail.”

The morning after my slow-speed rail experience, I joined three hundred business types at a conference of the year-old U.S. High Speed Rail Association, one of those Washington lobbying outfits that spontaneously generate whenever multibillion-dollar initiatives are born. At a Hilton alongside the future location of a high-speed station, vendors hoping to cash in on the Tampa–Orlando line displayed slick models of German, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese super-trains, as well as video of a French train traveling a record 357 mph. Thirty foreign manufacturers had already pledged to build U.S. factories if they landed contracts, and the national market was so lucrative that everyone wanted a foot in the door in Florida. A marketing rep for one European firm was bragging to me about its expansion plans when she spied the head of Florida’s rail program across the room, broke off our chat in mid-sentence, and raced off to introduce herself. When I asked one lobbyist what he was doing there, he grinned and rubbed his thumb against two fingers.

If greed was the conference’s main theme—a promising sign, I thought—then grumbling was the subtheme. USHSR leaders were all about bullet trains; few of the firms that paid their pricey membership and conference fees were interested in improving Amtrak’s hundred-year-old tunnels, eighty-year-old electrical systems, and sixty-year-old
trains. So their initial excitement about Obama’s high-speed program had given way to gripes about his investment choices: Why throw money at old Amtrak lines that bleed cash and share track with slow-moving freight, instead of focusing exclusively on game-changing new 200 mph bullets? How on earth did Ohio’s 3-C Corridor linking Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati at a pitiful average speed of 39 mph and a top speed of 79 mph—first achieved in Andrew Jackson’s administration—qualify as “high-speed”?

One of the sharpest critics at the Hilton was Orlando congressman John Mica, the ranking Republican on the House transportation committee. Mica was an enthusiastic infrastructure advocate who had led the chorus of complaints about the stimulus being light on public works; he had always been an enthusiastic advocate of high-speed rail as well. But now he wasn’t even enthusiastic about the bullet train in his backyard. It would have five rapid-fire stops, and none would link up with Orlando’s new commuter line, prompting talk of a sixth. “You can’t have real high-speed rail if you’re stopping all the time,” Mica told me. “I should be as happy as a hog eating trash. But we need a real success, and this is pretty marginal.” Mica said the only high-speed grant worthy of the name went to California, to start building a route that would connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours. But the land had yet to be purchased, the route wasn’t set, and the estimated cost was ballooning in a state that was already broke. “California is the only hope—if they don’t totally screw it up,” Mica groused.

Mica was even harsher on the Amtrak upgrades, calling them “slow-speed trains to nowhere,” perpetuating a “Soviet-style monopoly” that lost money on every ticket it sold outside the Northeast Corridor. If Obama was so desperate to improve Amtrak, Mica asked, why not focus on that profitable stretch in the Northeast, where Biden’s beloved Acela trains already reached 150 mph but averaged only half that? In Acela’s first decade, rail had displaced air as the dominant mode between New York and Washington, but the majority of U.S. flight delays were still at congested New York airports. Imagine how many more travelers would switch if Acela ever reached its potential.

“We need to pick routes that make sense,” Mica said. “If we pick dogs, we’ll end up scratching fleas.”

Later that week, in LaHood’s office overlooking the Washington Nationals ballpark, I recounted what his former Republican colleague had said. LaHood’s eyes narrowed. His face turned fuchsia. “It’s just a stunning about-face!” he shouted. “It’s schizophrenic! We did everything John asked!” It was Mica who invited him to Orlando to deliver his stern message about commuter rail, and later thanked him for saving high-speed rail in Florida. LaHood was starting to feel like the only Republican allowed to say nice things in public about anything Obama supported.

No, Tampa–Orlando was not a classic bullet route, but it would knit together two boomtowns quickly and cheaply, showing the country what trains could do. And the extension to Miami was perfect for high-speed rail; my ten-hour slog would be sliced to two hours. Sure, the dense Northeast Corridor was train heaven, but eliminating its urban bottlenecks would require huge investments to produce modest reductions in trip times. Anyway, none of the name-all-the-other-countries relied exclusively on state-of-the-art bullet trains. Why should we?

LaHood’s larger point was that Tampa–Orlando would be just one link in a more balanced, more sustainable, less dangerous transportation network. Population was growing and fuel prices were rising, while road and airport capacity was dwindling. “We can’t just keep building more highways that turn into parking lots,” he said. Making rail a viable option outside the Northeast would require better trains, not just bullet trains.

T
he way to go fast, railroaders say, is to stop going slow.

My train to Orlando took so long because of that half hour beside the oak, plus several longer stretches at jogger speeds. Almost all of Amtrak’s tracks are owned by freight lines, and they’re riddled with time-sucking choke points, like sharp curves and grade crossings that require slow speeds for safety, or long single-track stretches that force trains to wait next to oak trees for oncoming traffic to pass. In Chicago,
I visited one of America’s worst blockages, an old-fashioned “diamond” in the Englewood neighborhood that pits seventy-eight commuter trains against sixty Amtrak and freight trains every day. It’s like an intersection in the middle of an interstate. I arrived well after rush hour, but I still saw gridlock; one Norfolk Southern train hauling grain, lumber, and steel across the country was delayed at least forty minutes. Amtrak trains from Detroit routinely wait even longer.

That’s why the high-speed grants included $133 million for an overpass that will replace the diamond and ease the chronic Amtrak delays. The Englewood Flyover will also save suburbanites over twenty minutes a day on their commutes, and start untangling the spaghetti bowl of convoluted tracks that carry one fourth of the nation’s freight through Greater Chicago. Throughout the area, I saw similar workaday projects that would add capacity and subtract choke points: sidings to allow faster trains to pass laggards, grade separations to avoid conflicts with cars, advanced signal systems with automated crossovers to replace hand-thrown switches. The goal is to make Chicago the hub of a truly competitive Midwestern rail network—not by building new bullet-only lines from scratch, but by gradually improving the existing network.

“It’s not sexy,” says Szabo, a fifth-generation railroader who once worked as a switchman on the Illinois Central and a conductor on Chicago’s commuter rail. “But if you take out enough pinch points, you’re going to make trains more attractive.”

For example, over $1 billion worth of Recovery Act upgrades will slice over an hour off travel times between Chicago and St. Louis. The work will only increase the top speed to 110 mph, half as fast as the California bullet plan. But it will make the Amtrak option faster than driving, which should make it more attractive, so that Amtrak can run more frequent trains, which will make it even more attractive. One reason the Northeast Corridor is so popular is the convenience of knowing the trains run every hour. Similarly, a new bridge to eliminate a single-track snarl between St. Louis and Kansas City should dramatically improve on-time performance, converting a train people don’t take unless they have to into a train people might take because they want to.

Ever since Amtrak was chartered in 1971 to take over the money-losing passenger lines of freight railroads, it’s been the ugly duckling of the transportation world, starved of funding for maintenance, neglected by presidents of both parties, notorious for dreadful service. The Recovery Act was a first step toward respectability.

“There’s been a total focus on aviation and highways in this country. It’s nuts!” says Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman, another Republican. “Now we can start to build a railroad that works.”

At the same time, projects like the Englewood Flyover and that bridge in Missouri will help freight railroads, which move our stuff around the country less expensively and more fuel-efficiently than long-haul trucks, and maintain their tracks on their own dime. This is another untold story of the stimulus, its unprecedented aid for freight upgrades that will unclog the arteries of our commerce—including a $100 million TIGER grant for further untangling of Chicago’s spaghetti bowl. Shifting cargo from gas-guzzling trucks to trains that can move a ton of freight 457 miles per gallon is one of the most powerful ways to reduce oil dependence and promote economic competitiveness.

But that’s not how high-speed rail was marketed. By the spring of 2010, Obama had overhyped high-speed, underplayed intercity, and barely mentioned freight. The bullet train projects that got all the love didn’t have shovels in the ground, while the incremental improvements that were under way didn’t seem to justify his lofty rhetoric. The administration had spread the cash around multiple states to try to build broad support for future investments; instead, it created multiple targets for political attacks.

“We’re giving birth,” Szabo told me. “That can be messy and painful.”

High-speed rail was the Recovery Act’s most extreme example of a long-term project—not only because of its start-up lags, but because it would require a sustained national commitment to achieve its objectives. Tampa–Orlando made sense as the first leg of Tampa–Orlando–Miami, but as a stand-alone project it was basically an expensive commuter line and glorified Disney shuttle. California’s $2.25 billion grant, the largest in the country, was only enough to finance a
start-up track to nowhere in the Central Valley, from the small farm town of Corcoran to the unincorporated burg of Borden; it would require tens of billions more to get anywhere near Los Angeles or San Francisco. And as a one-off investment, $400 million for Ohio’s 3-C service would be a laughable waste; at go-kart speeds, it would never draw drivers off the highway. It was defensible only as a first step toward competitive speeds, as a link in a real regional network, as a hedge against oil shocks that could make long drives expensive and short flights extinct.