How high speed trains got railroaded in Biden's infrastructure plan

By ALEX THOMPSON , THEODORIC MEYER and TANYA SNYDER 04/02/2021 06:53 PM EDT

With help from Allie Bice

Welcome to POLITICO’s 2021 Transition Playbook, your guide to the first 100 days of the Biden administration

We all know JOE BIDEN likes — okay, loooooooves — trains.

He has written that the Amtrak staff provided him with “another family entirely.” The Amtrak station in Wilmington, Del., is named after him. In 2006, his son, noted locomotive expert HUNTER BIDEN, joined Amtrak’s board — the Senate easily confirmed him by a voice vote.

So it’s no surprise that the infrastructure plan he proposed this week includes $80 billion for national and intercity rail over eight years, or $10 billion a year — five times the annual $2 billion in subsidies Amtrak gets.

What was a surprise is that nowhere in Biden’s nearly 12,000-word plan are the words “high-speed rail.”

When Biden was tasked with implementing the Recovery Act in 2009, the $8 billion dedicated in the bill to high-speed trains washis favorite initiative. He equated it to the beginning of the interstate highway system and sold it as a win-win for workers and environmentalists. He proposed billions more in high-speed rail funding in subsequent years to help create a nationwide bullet train system.

But even the chief advocates of those plans admit now that they failed.

“The high speed rail program that Vice President Biden and our team proposed ended up being a pretty big disappointment,” said RAY LaHOOD, the Transportation secretary at the time. The fast choo-choos in Tampa, Milwaukee, and from San Francisco to Los Angeles that Biden promised still do not exist more than a decade later.

Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida saw the opportunity to score political points and prove their fiscal discipline by spurning the cash for said projects. But LaHood said part of the problem also was the high cost of building a new line from scratch.

California gleefully took the federal money. But the projects cost more than anticipated and the state now says the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line is out of reach until 2033. Instead, the authority is working to get trains running between the Central Valley cities of Merced and Bakersfield (hardly the West Coast’s version of the Acela corridor) by the end of the decade…

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/transition-playbook/2021/04/02/the-three-words-not-in-bidens-infrastructure-plan-492348