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Posted Apr 21, 2011, 3:07 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt calls the rail plan — target of a coordinated attack by the Right — “a complete catastrophe,” and tells where the nation should focus.
April 21st, 2011
By Philip Langdon
Read More: http://newurbannetwork.com/article/h...E2%80%99-14561
Quote:
The time has come to candidly examine why President Obama’s high-speed rail proposal is in such terrible shape — and to figure out how passenger rail service could be expanded despite the serious recent setbacks. One leader well worth listening to is Bruce Babbitt — a thoughtful politician who was President Clinton’s Interior Secretary and, before that, governor of Arizona for nine years. Babbitt let loose his frustrations last week, identifying himself as “an advocate of high-speed rail” who views what’s happened over the past year as “a complete catastrophe.”
- With segments of the rail plan now cancelled in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and with some federal funding revoked by Congressional Republicans this month, Babbitt thinks we must approach rail planning much more strategically than the Obama administration did. Of the president’s stated aim — provision of high-speed rail service to 80 percent of the American population in 25 years — Babbitt declared, “It’s fantasy.”
In his view, the Obama plan suffers from these critical flaws:
• Routes were poorly chosen. The Orlando-to-Tampa line — 84 miles mostly in an Interstate highway corridor — would have run from one city that’s “not a model of transit” to another city with the same transit deficiency. Said Babbitt: “Frankly, it’s not surprising that the governor of Florida [when offered 90 percent of the funds to construct the line] turned it down.”
• Goals were defined vaguely. They were not hammered out through extensive discussion and political brokering — activities essential, in Babbitt’s judgment, to the program’s success.
• “The president didn’t help his visionary statement by holding up the transcontinental railroad as a model.” One-hundred-forty million acres were distributed to railroads through that post-Civil War enterprise, which led to the Crédit Mobilier scandal — “one of the largest government-sponsored fraudulent ventures of all time.”
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- Rail proponents should emulate not the transcontinental railroad but rather the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, Babbitt believes. Like today’s high-speed rail initiative, the interstate highway proposal initially received a hostile reception in influential quarters. “The governors were largely opposed,” Babbitt said. Most came out against a raise in the gasoline tax or in excise taxes. Ultimately, the highway act owed its passage to “a lot of discussion, brokering, setting goals,” according to Babbitt. Negotiation over where the highways would be built “took place ahead of the act.” The same should hold true for any far-reaching rail program, he thinks.
- “Let’s start with something realistic, where the payoffs will be most real,” Babbitt urged. The nation’s biggest megaregion, the dense corridor from Boston to Washington, already “carries one-third of Amtrak’s traffic,” making it, in his view, a logical place to demonstrate that high-speed rail can work. The biggest difficulty, he indicated, is that high-speed rail requires a dedicated form of financing. Would the country as a whole be willing to pay for a system serving seven or so states? That’s highly unlikely, said Babbitt. “There are 43 states that will say no to an earmarked tax.” The way to overcome that obstacle is by establishing a gasoline tax that would be paid by residents of the Northeast corridor states, he argued. “That’s the lesson of the Interstate Highway Act. We need to get back to dedicated user fees. It should be focused on regional users.”
- Jerold Kayden, a Harvard professor of urban planning and design, asked why the governors of those states couldn’t get together and work out a deal themselves. “I was a governor,” Babbitt reminded Kayden. “This rail corridor is not going to work with seven governors [actually, probably eight or nine, plus the District of Columbia] going their own way.” In the case of interstate highways, “Babbitt maintained, the only way we got clarity was through federal legislation,” and that’s the only way to nail down a high-speed program for the Eastern seaboard. “It’s not going to happen this year,” he acknowledged, but it can be done, he thinks, if there is “a clear purpose,” if the leaders “strip the discretion out” of the legislation, and if they “do it through the political process.”
- “We do approach European densities in megaregions” such as the Boston-to-Washington corridor, said Todorovich. Megaregions — there are about 10 of them around the country, including the Great Lakes, the Texas Triangle (Houston-Dallas-Austin-San Antonio), the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and Cascadia (Portland-Tacoma-Seattle) — contain 75 percent of the nation’s population and are key to America’s economic growth, she emphasized.
- For companies that profit from the highway system and automobile-reliant means of transportation, the libertarian or conservative foundations have proven to be useful torch-bearers. SourceWatch, part of the Center for Media and Democracy, reports that Ford Motor, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell Oil, and the Western States Petroleum Association, have been among the donors to the Reason Foundation. David H. Koch of Koch Industries, once described by the Center for Public Integrity as "the biggest oil company you have never heard of," is a Reason trustee.
- Nonetheless, Todorovich thinks rail projects can gain considerable support from the populace and some of it from Republicans who hold elective office. After the new governor of Florida, Rick Scott, rejected $2.4 billion in federal funds for the Orlando-Tampa rail route, 24 states, including 11 with Republican governors, applied for portions of the money that Florida gave up.
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Last edited by M II A II R II K; Apr 22, 2011 at 5:26 AM.
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