Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
House to Vote on High-Speed Rail Funding, National Infrastructure Bank
The House is set today to vote on a fiscal 2010 transportation spending bill that would provide $4 billion for high-speed rail and lay the groundwork for the creation of a national infrastructure bank.
The French state railway operator SNCF decided to order 35 new-generation TGV high-speed rail cars costing more than 1.0 billion euros (1.4 billion dollars).
(AFP/File/Fred Dufour) H.R. 3288 (pdf) would provide a total of $75.8 billion for the Transportation Department, an $8.6 billion jump from fiscal 2009.
The $4 billion for high-speed and intercity passenger rail is four times the total President Obama had sought for the upcoming fiscal year. The economic stimulus included $8 billion to jump-start a high-speed rail network, and the White House requested an additional $1 billion annually over the next five years.
A provision in the spending bill allows Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to transfer half of the high-speed rail program's $4 billion to a national infrastructure bank, if one is authorized by Congress before the end of fiscal 2010. Obama had requested $5 billion for 2010 to start the bank to expand existing transportation investments by providing seed money for capital projects.
Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, will offer an amendment that would scale back the high-speed rail cash to $1 billion and transfer the remaining $3 billion to the cash-strapped Highway Trust Fund. Latham offered a similar amendment during last week's markup that was defeated, 22-37.
The White House offered its support for the entire spending bill and applauded the passenger rail funding increase and the infrastructure bank provision.
Click here to read the rest of the article.
- Posted in
27 Comments so far
Show AllI hope it gets passed.
High speed rail would provide great economic stimulus during construction of the systems and after they are in operation.
This $4 billion or wait maybe just $1 billion for high speed rail is almost a meaningless joke.
Yeah and the House Transportation Committee will allocate something near $70 billion on highways and freeways. Repair existing infrastructure but no more of our tax money for wider highways/freeways and new freeways like I-69!
That number sounds low to me though. There seems to be something fishy in Denmark here. I've heard from other sources that Congress is looking to spend hundreds of billions of our tax money for new paving and bigger freeways? Where are they hiding the rest of the paving pork bills?
Give me frickin break.
LA HOOD. Great choice Obama. Appoint the top Paving Mafia Representative to run the Transportation Department. Doesn't that just say it all.
just a little reminder here; France has only 63 millions people and the 1.4 billion is just for the machines, the infrastructure is already in place... So yeah not that much investment for a country of about 300 millions with almost no high speed train infrastructure...
So France does not have the economy of scale that the US has. Fact is, if you never start, you never finish.
Q? How many fatalities have there been on the TGV.
A: None.
Q? How do you know when the train is doing 300kmph (about 190mph)?
A: There is a sign up in the compartment that tells you the speed.
Granted it would take some work (for which read money). My guess is that the cost of all the private jets of GM executives would have made a good downpayment.
High speed rail will compete with air travel, cars, trucks, roads, etc. The fact that it is much cheaper, cleaner, faster, more comfortable, more fuel efficient, has a smaller footprint and would provide lots of jobs cannot overcome the fact that oil companies buy governments in order to sell oil.
Plus high speed rail will actually help reduce health care costs. Did you know that sitting through very heavy traffic jams and/or long distances daily can have a toll on the health and drive up the health care costs? That's something I learned the hard way.
Is that what happened to you? I'm so sorry.
I'm fortunate enough to have never suffered that kind of stress...I never bothered learning how to drive :-)
The costs of living can sometimes differ so much to the point that one wouldn't mind putting themselves through a long drive to and from work. Plus, metro used to get kind of sloppy and pricey. My company used to reimburse for metro but nowadays they don't so I thought too desperately that what's to lose by driving and that maybe I'd find a way to go and avoid the traffic as best as possible. I had thought that I could be like my coworkers and try leaving for work at 6 in the morning every day. Boy was I wrong. Getting up earlier turned out to be so stressful and driving in a sleepy mood at 6AM was the last thing to have to put up with. Even at that hour, traffic could end up jamming so badly plus I forgot that they had their families to assist them. I would listen to light music in the morning and a variety in the evenings to try get myself out of the mood.
Good news today though which kind of made me excited. Although I'll have to get back to driving, my company is getting an additional office floor 20 miles west of its place. This means that I'll only have to drive 25 miles to work instead of 45 so I'll be somewhat spared. The company is willing to try remote working and video teleconferencing for what it's worth. The only caveat is I'll have to find another location for my current gym membership near that office. I could also choose to go from that midpoint location to my main office by around 1 hour before lunch time though I don't want to drive too much either. :)
I'm surprised that you were able to get away without having to learn to drive. Back when I was in high school, people would harass anyone who didn't have a driver's license by their 16th birthday and that was when I lived out in the rurals. I swear, driving would get in the way of their studying if nothing else for a distraction. You must have had better schools in FL where students wouldn't get big on driving.
Well I really didn't care for high school at all, and ended up dropping out. So I didn't care what the schmucks there thought about it :-)
By the age of 16, I had gained a ton of weight, my parents divorced and we had to move into a much smaller place, my mom became ill and was losing her job, and I was basically failing school. I had much bigger concerns than being able to drive to the movie theater on the weekend.
Scale it down to $1 billion ?!? $4 billion is already too small enough as veenataos pointed out on the issue of US vs France. I wouldn't reserve a penny towards highway repair. Let the US highways rot so that those stupid gas guzzlers are eventually forced off the road by Mother Nature. I'm getting tired of sitting through heavy traffic and I don't look forward to it once I have to get back to driving to and from work in September rather than working from home.
We do need to keep roads and highways in good order for trucks. Cargo trucks are the lifeblood of our economy...and will continue to be until they come up a way to teleport materials everwhere, pretty much.
This is actually a huge misconception. Some trucks will always be necessary, true. But the vast majority of trucks on the roads are not making local trips, they are making interstate and cross-country trips. This could be far more efficiently accomplished with trains transporting the goods over the long distance, and trucks hauling it the 10-20 miles or so it would take to get to its specific destination.
We should also be consuming more and more local goods and try to limit, whenever possible, goods from far away. This includes (especially) food.
"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow"
Actually, there are more cargo trains being developed for transporting goods. The railroad infrastructure all over the country that used to exist until the autos took over needs to be revamped and modernized. The heartland could sure see a ray of light rather than staying stuck in the dark. Excellent ideas on going local though.
Thanks for the info guys.
"75.8 billion for the Transportation Department, an $8.6 billion jump from fiscal 2009"
They are only increasing the budget a little over a 10% from this year. This is a "jump"? If they added a couple of zeros to that 4 billion we might be talking about something meaningful, that is, something other than "crumbs."
Amen brother. After reading about the computer malfunctioning that caused the devastating crash in the DC Metro a while back and after reading your suggestion on making it $400 billion, I thought to myself that I would love to switch over to a job on programming on the trains for a change what with the IT skills I have. It's a shame that $400 billion goes towards wars and only $4 billion on improving public transportation at all and then there's the possibility of "scaling it back" to $1 billion ? The more oil this country guzzles, the more blood and terrorists it creates. Truly sickening !
Go for it dude. That crash was actually at my local metro stop, but I rarely use the metro, the buses are much more convenient to work for me. But I have used the metro a few times recently when going further south in DC. I got some sort of vertigo from it, being from Florida, I'm not used to being a few hundred feet underground.
Whoa. I'm glad you weren't affected by it. Living in Hampton Roads, VA there are very few buses and virtually no trains. Then governor Mark Warner cut the funding for maglev trains that were to start at ODU in Norfolk and possibly spread to throughout Hampton Roads. No word on funding public transportation in the area. Northern Virginia is the worst in traffic as I've visited that area frequently as part of my business but Hampton Roads seems to be catching up since this area seems to be the second fastest in economic growth throughout the state. I would love to visit Florida but not by going all the way down I-95. I'll have to find a good train service. I think AMTRAK is one.
It'll take about a day, but Amtrak is nice. Nice, wide seats, perfect for my fat ass. I have difficulty with planes because the seats are so narrow, it sucks.
I hope when they talk "high speed rail" they're referring to MAGLEV trains. If not, they're going to be throwing a shit-load of borrowed cash at outdated technology.
If you don't know what MAGLEV is, get educated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_(transport)
http://www.howstuffworks.com/maglev-train.htm
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Summer03/maglev2.html
Moondoggy, I'll be glad to show my state representatives and governor what you pointed out on MAGLEV trains. Then Governor Mark Warner cut the funding for MAGLEV train and rail development that was to start in Norfolk VA at ODU and eventually spread to Hampton Roads. With the area growing economically and traffic getting ridiculously worse year after year with very few public buses in sight with less than 10 on the ones that do show up, I can't see why we can't have the state funding for MAGLEV development brought back. Highway maintenance in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia is also proving to be burdensome and all this HOV hiding to distort traffic data reporting isn't helping either.
Washington Metro could try out MAGLEV for a change given a major crash that killed over 80 people and injured several hundred not too long ago and all because it was outdated technology that caused the computers to get it all wrong in addition to serious programming errors.
Hey Max, if you have any influence in government circles, please inform them. I think many bureaucrats are just uninformed about some of the available technology that should be promoted and funded.
We need a nationwide MAGLEV transportation system.
Thanks!
If the key benefit of maglev is speed, I don't think the DC metro needs it. Trust me, it's plenty fast...sometimes that stations are less than a minute apart.
zmann. I just gotta share something with you of a kind of personal nature. Believe me, I understand this is a sensitive issue, and I share this with all due respect. My cousin emailed me recently and told me he lost 130 pounds. I was blown away, not actually having seen him in some years.
I'm like, "holy cow, dude, I remember when you weighed 130 pounds!" He said, yeah, I put on a lot of weight since those days." I asked how, and he said his job entailed driving all over the country selling computers, so he ate a lot of fast food. So I asked him how he lost so much weight. He said, "I quit eating fast food and started riding my bike every day".
Just last week I saw a guy riding his bike along side our 2 lane highway. He was all geared up for a multi-day long-distance bike tour. He looked like he weighed 300+ pounds, but he was doing it. I just thought, "good for you man! Way to go!"
I've read a few of your posts where you mentioned your weight. I only want to encourage you for what it's worth. I hope this helps.
On that note, I'm going for a bike ride.
Thanks dude.
But I actually lose weight a lot better from walking than from biking...and getting a bike that supports me costs several hundred dollars, which I don't have. And I love walking up here :-)
".....a national infrastructure bank, if one is authorized by Congress before the end of fiscal 2010."
If this is the same National Infrastructure Bank proposed by Lyndon LaRouche,Jr., it could be established under the powers of Congress and "operate as a capital source, outside the demands and contstraints of the Federal operating budget".
If Congress fails us on this one, this country will never get people back to work and we will never see an economic recovery.