Last week, Canada’s environment minister walked back comments about not funding new highways before I could even manage to send the comments to my friends in amazement. And while the US Secretary of Transportation has talked a big game about new transit and rail investments, there still isn’t any rail being laid for a 300-kph rail line anywhere in the US.
I think a big issue with the current crop of Can-American politicians on this issue is that while they recognize that there is a problem, they don’t seem to have the answer.
Throwing more money at the systems that have delivered us so little transit and intercity rail (especially the later) over the last several decades, and expecting that to amount of anything substantial is a fool’s errand. If a few subway and light rail extensions, some Northeast Corridor improvements (that mostly should have happened generations ago), and Brightline West are a majority of the new capital projects that have come out of the unprecedented funding that the US has thrown at new rail projects since 2020, I think it’s very fair to label this effort a failure (seriously, we are talking amounts of money that would more than build several of the world’s high speed rail systems in their entirety!). We just do not need a degree change in the way we are building rail and public transport projects; we need a sea change.
Canada has arguably fared better; we seem to be more capable of building cost effectively and we’ve thrown way more funding on a per capita basis at capital expansion, and so there has been an impact. But many of the same issues that dog the US also dog its neighbour to the north, and we are worse on intercity rail — I mean, politicians are afraid to even utter the phrase “high-speed”!
It was less than ten years between when John F. Kennedy announced that the US would put a man on the moon to that actually happening, and I really think a similar national- (or perhaps continental) level initiative is needed for high-speed rail. It can’t just be something that we would like and that we’ll throw some money towards, if we want high-speed rail on the scale that we frankly need it, then we also need a dramatic push for it. Laws need to be changed, funding priorities need to be reconsidered, and crippling problems like high costs need to be tackled head on (much like Apollo, building a big high-speed rail network that — unlike Brightline West, actually goes to city centres — will require lots of funding and cost effective construction). Mountains were moved to build the Interstate Highway system, and more than 70-billion dollars and some nice comments about fast trains will be needed to see real progress on this front.
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