A new proposal by the House Ways and Means Committee would eliminate a crucial source of mass transit funding, posing a major threat to the nation's transit systems.
The bill would prohibit the use of gasoline-tax revenue to support public transportation, a funding stream that has been in place for more than three decades. If the bill were to pass, it would introduce a level of uncertainty that will make planning for capital projects far more difficult and expensive.
While high-speed rail has struggled to secure adequate financing in the U.S., in Britain, the government has given the green light to begin construction on the country's second bullet train. The U.K. government's decision to move forward with the controversial project offers important lessons as the U.S. pursues its own high-speed rail corridors in California and the Northeast.
America 2050 is calling on landscape conservation practitioners and interested citizens to take the Landscape Conservation Tools Survey. The survey is intended to inform our efforts to create web tools for people working to protect and conserve large natural areas of open space, scenic beauty, historic significance, or wildlife habitat. The survey includes a list of questions to gauge how people might use a large landscape web portal and should take less than five minutes to complete.
The partners in this effort include: America 2050, Regional Plan Association, The Trust for Public Land, the University of Montana's Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and other members of the Practitioners' Network for Large Landscape Conservation, who are looking at ways to facilitate landscape conservation through on-line tools and websites.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority has released a business plan for California's statewide high-speed rail program. The business plan makes significant refinements to the previous ridership and revenue projections and cost estimates. The Authority also updated the phasing plan and overall timeline, and established a new funding plan that shows the feasibility of substantial private financing to pay for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of various segments of the project. The aspect of the business plan that is certain to attract the most headlines is the project's new price tag, which has grown from $43 billion to 65.4 billion in 2010 dollars, or $98.5 billion when accounting for inflation over the life of the project.
The business plan also includes a detailed analysis of what it would cost California to accommodate the same amount of growth in travel without high-speed rail - $171 billion over the next 40 years to pay for 2,300 lane miles of new highway capacity, 115 new airport gates, and 4 new runways. With high-speed rail in California, the business plan estimates that the system's construction will generate 100,000 jobs within the first 5 years, and 1 million jobs over time.
On November 1 the U.S. Senate voted to approve a "minibus" bill that
combined transportation, housing, and other spending bills. The minibus
bill included $1.48 billion for Amtrak and $100 million for the
High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program (HSIPR) in the Fiscal Year
2012.
High-speed rail has been adopted throughout the world, and is now being planned and developed in the United States. Over the past 50 years, U.S. transportation spending has heavily favored the development of interstate highway and aviation systems. In the meantime, countries such as China, Japan, Spain, France, and Germany have been investing in modern, high-speed rail systems to satisfy the travel demands of their current and future generations. As the United States embarks on the High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program launched in 2009, it can learn from the experiences of other countries in planning, constructing, and operating high-speed rail.
This long-term perspective, discussion of benefits, and recommendations for making high-speed rail work in the United States is presented in a new report released today by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called "High-Speed Rail: International Lessons for U.S. Policy Makers" (PDF). Written by RPA authors Petra Todorovich, Dan Schned, and Robert Lane, the report documents lessons from over four decades of international experience in high-speed rail in Europe and Asia, applies them to the U.S. context, and recommends a fresh approach that creates new, accountable, rail management structures, brings in the private sector, and concentrates for now on California and the Northeast.
