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Undo “Damage” of Interstates?


AT A PASSENGER TRAINS on Freight Railroads conference in downtown Washing- ton on October 25, Federal Railroad Admin- istrator Joseph Szabo pointed to an article in Fortune magazine describing a huge transportation project. The magazine’s point (that the undertaking had all the ap- pearances of a boondoggle) raised the fol- lowing issues: 1) It’s too big. 2) Who’s going to pay for it? 3) It is intended to fight the re- cession (as opposed to providing genuinely needed transportation). 4) It will expand feder- al power. 5) It won’t work as a stimulus scheme. Then, as if he had bagged a “gotcha” mo-


ment, the administrator informed his audi- ence that the article in question appeared in 1958, and the huge “boondoggle” it was de- scribing was the Interstate Highway Sys- tem, then in its early planning stages. Mr. Szabo’s point was that much of the criticism of the grandiose highway plans of 53 years ago is being heard in today’s warning about his agency’s plans for High Speed Rail (HSR) in the 21st Century. One need not get into the weeds about the administration’s HSR ambitions to make the following points to Administrator Szabo, as I did in a discussion after he completed his talk to the annual conference organized by Railway Age magazine: The barriers cited by Fortune in 1958


dealt with what turned out to be an un- precedented, huge infrastructure project that went far beyond mere transportation in the sense of getting “from here to there.” The Interstate highway, as is obvious to-


day, brought about radical alterations of our landscape and lifestyles — i.e., extreme sprawl, whose effect was to force Americans to haul two tons of rubber and steel for vir- tually every trip, no matter how short. Side- walks even disappeared from many neigh- borhoods. In some metropolitan areas, people “think nothing” of driving 150 miles to work each weekday. Those who “think something” of it are, in some cases, left to pound sand. The argument has been made that a com- prehensive truly national HSR map — espe- cially if it fills out with local transit connec- tions at stations — will result in uprooting those whose whole lives and pursuits center around what the automobile/asphalt com- plex hath wrought. To what extent can land- scape and lifestyles be reversed or revised in a significant way? Are we not trying to un- scramble an egg here? Administrator Szabo responded that he


and his cohorts at FRA were well aware of those infrastructure/cultural issues, and that they are factors “in everything we do,” in part because some of the consequences of the Interstate highway were “unintended.” He added that the 100 million human beings who are expected to be added to our popula- tion by 2050 would be primarily concentrat- ed in the “mega-regions” of the nation more amendable to the urban environment that is compatible with high-frequency HSR. This time, according to Mr. Szabo, the conse- quences hopefully will be “intended.”


The conversation ended at that point. We


don’t intend here and now to get into a dis- cussion of whether on the one hand, in the next generation suburbs will deteriorate as the populace is lured to a “back to the city” movement in which many end up living in pill boxes above a subway stop (a nightmare haunting critics with an extreme “country squire” mindset) or, on the other hand, we end up rejecting one extreme without neces- sarily sliding into the other.


HSR Outlook? Mixed Administrator Szabo’s optimism as to the fu- ture of his HSR program is shared in Texas, but is shakier in California. By the end of No- vember the Texas Department of Trans- portation was planning to contract out pre- liminary engineering and environmental work on a proposal to run a “core express” rail service between Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth. The planned top speed: 150 m.p.h. This could be the beginning of what sup-


porters see as “the first true high speed rail line constructed and operated in the United States,” a federal FRA prognostication with which Texas DOT Rail Division Director Bill Glavin does not disagree. He points out that the state of Texas includes three of the top ten major metropolitan areas in the nation. In addition to Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth, there is Austin/San Antonio. All three are within 300 miles of each other — ideal for high-speed rail corridor service. He says some freight rail interests in the state are interest- ed in “perhaps doing some work” within their rights of way to facilitate the operation. In the Golden State, a new business plan released on November 1 showed that the to- tal cost of building California’s proposed San Francisco-Los Angeles Basin HSR could climb to nearly $100 billion, adjusted for in- flation, over 20 years. Nonetheless, the doc- ument also asserted the system would turn a profit even at the lowest ridership projec- tions. And it assumed private investment will account for 20 per cent of the cost; critics have sharply disputed both assumptions. The plan also supports retention of the construction of the Central Valley “spine” from Fresno to Bakersfield on the north- south route. Critics have labeled this initial segment “the train to nowhere.” Planners argued that starting in the rural section of the state would encounter less NIMBY re- sistance than anticipated later in the more heavily-populated urban parts of the line. We’re talking “real money here,” the plan-


ners concede, while adding that California’s growing population would otherwise incur about $170 billion spending on such alterna- tive projects as freeways and airport runways.


Passenger Privatization (Again?) There was, as usual, a lot of “out of the box” thinking at the Railway Age conference. For example, Frank Wilner, the well-known rail transportation author and journalist, re- turned to the group to raise (again) the ques- tion — just a question, it was not a first


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