The President seems to be pushing hard for high speed rail. His budget which he’ll send over to Congress next week (make sure to tune in Tuesday Feb 15 morning for the GovLoop Live Chat about it) has 8 billion set aside for high speed rail.Total it’s said that we are dumping 53 billion into rail over the next 6 years.
Sounds good right? Well yeah… if it actually goes to high speed rail. According to an article in the Washington Post the last time Obama pushed for high speed rail most of the money actually went to low speed trains.
Investing more in high-speed rail will keep U.S. competitive, White House says
The White House push for high-speed rail construction was launched with $8 billion in stimulus act funding. Later LaHood added $2.5 billion to boost the effort in 23 states. California has received the bulk of the awards – about $3 billion total.
Virginia received $45.4 million in the last round of funding to help pay for studies and preliminary engineering to improve service between Richmond and Washington. But more than half that money went for trains that travel much slower than the 150 to 220 mph common in Europe and Japan.
So here’s my questions.
1) Is it worth it?
2) Assuming they do build high speed rail name 2 routes that you would use
3) How fast would a train have to go to make you consider not driving or flying?