Obama Announces $13 Billion Train Project

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced a $13 billion high-speed American rail transit development project on Thursday.

The transportation project will be funded by an initial down payment of $8 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds and an additional $1 billion per year for five years, beginning with the 2010 budget.

Ten regional rail systems have been identified for the project: the California Corridor, the Pacific Northwest Corridor, the South Central Corridor, the Gulf Coast Corridor, the Chicago Hub Network, the Florida Corridor, the Southeast Corridor, the Keystone Corridor, the Empire Corridor and the Northern New England Corridor.

Amtrak, the passenger rail system founded in 1971, operates with revenue below expenses and receives an annually increasing federal subsidy reaching $6.3 million for fiscal year 2013, as mandated in the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

Additionally, Amtrak received $1.3 billion of the 2009 ARRA funds.

The difference between the existing rail transit system that operates at a $6.3 million annual deficit and the proposed rail transit system which will presumably operate at a staggering deficit, as well, is that the new rail transit system will have 150-mile-per-hour trains. Why have one underutilized, operationally inadequate transit system when American travelers can have two that are rarely used?

Of course, the new $13 billion high-speed train system is meant to serve as a disincentive for American travelers to drive the 100,000 automobiles that the Obama Administration encouraged them to buy three weeks ago.

Spend lots of money on more cars, while already spending lots of money to subsidize one underutilized rail transit system, then spend lots of money to build another rail transit system, then stop driving the cars that cost lots of money and ride the new underutilized rail transit system that cost lots of money to build and costs lots of money to operate, instead, while there already was an underutilized transit system?