Obama Announces $13B For Railroads
Magyarul a pendolino.blog.hu-n.
“The time is right now for us to start thinking about high-speed rail as an alternative to air transportation connecting all these cities,” Obama said. “And think about what a great project that would be in terms of rebuilding America.”
Obama has just taken the opportunity to prove his commitment to green transportation: the US government bailout of almost $800 billion announced yesterday includes $8 billion for high speed train systems. Furthermore, $1 billion more each year is dedicated to HSLs in the next 5 years, which is alltogether eight times more than what the Bush administration planned.
Although the proposition was passed relatively easy, Republicans were not completely enthusiastic; many misinterpreted it accidentally or intentionally, expecting the money to fund a Las Vegas-California line, dubbed the “Sin City-Disneyland” high speed. In fact, CA does have a reasonable high speed plan for the Sacramento-Los Angeles-San Diego corridor (campaigning with a logo all too similar to Obama’s), but these fundings will be distributed among 11 competing regions (see map for planned HSR corridors).
Photo by airport, showing a 240 km/h max Acela Express on the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston, currently the only HSL in the American continent.
March 18th, 2009 at 19:03
[...] Let’s forget for a moment that Americans not just love to drive, but Amtrak trains are infrequent, slow (sometimes yielding to freight trains) and often late, and let’s imagine a brighter, maybe not-so-distant future: [...]