# Retrospective Evaluation of 2009/10 HSR Funding



## Anderson (Nov 18, 2014)

I chewed this over on the back end of some other discussions but could not figure out where best to put it. In the context of Obama's HSR push I can think of a few criticisms that can be leveled and some evaluations of them (granted, with the benefit of hindsight). For the moment, let me differentiate between a "mistake" and an "error": A "mistake" here is something that could/should have been foreseen as a potential problem and mitigated. An "error" is something that went wrong but that probably could not have been foreseen as an issue.

With that said...
(1) Branding it as high-speed rail. I don't think this was a mistake or an error...it put the proper "shiny" wrapping on the plan needed to sell it with at least some of the public.

(2) Not cutting red tape. Big, big mistake...it should have at least been feasible to find some way to cut back EIS work on some corridors, particularly those almost entirely within existing rail ROWs, to a year or so from the 3-4 years the process tends to take. Doing so might well have allowed a bunch of studies to be fired off in mid-2009 and decisions, however nominally rushed, to be together by 2010 (with funding coming down the pike then). This would go double for corridors that had been designated as priorities for HSR planning, many since the early 1990s.

(3) Not pushing funding out faster. This was mostly an error. Certain projects seem to have been destined for greenlighting from the start (OH, WI, FL, and CA jump to mind here). Waiting until late in 2010, especially when the money was then jammed out in the middle of an election campaign, was a mistake. I can excuse the second round of funding taking a bit more time to allocate, but almost all of the Stimulus cash should have been allocated by early 2010 and contracted by the end of the summer/start of the fall. With that said, the mistake parts are counteracted by the fact that nobody foresaw states actually _returning_ money to DC.

(4) Going for funding in small pieces. More mistake than error, particularly as 2010 began to develop. Though the degree of the wave wasn't clear, the fact that one was impending wasn't a shock. Though the degree of opposition wasn't expected, once a backlash was clearly building that should have been time to start shoving everything through. Moreover, Obama got a massive stimulus through in 2009...why didn't he just put everything he wanted to fund for the first four years (or even all eight) that didn't require a complex legal fix (i.e. immigration, health care, environment, gun control) into the bill when he had the numbers and initiative to ram it all through? Would a trillion-dollar bill (or two closely-spaced bills aimed at keeping the individual tags low) have gotten that much more opposition at the time?

(5) Not using the chance to overhaul Amtrak. Error as much as anything, drawing from earlier errors and mistakes. Ideally, the bills would have been set up to let Amtrak put in some sort of national plan that could be funded to overhaul equipment, acquire tracks, and/or carry out improvements without full state involvement. I consider the by-and-large exclusion of Amtrak to be a mistake, but the other aspects of this to be an error.

(6) Administering it at the state level. This strikes me as a mistake, albeit a limited one. By pushing it to this level any attempt to put together multi-state corridors, particularly where a state known to be recalcitrant (Indiana comes to mind) would be involved, was likely inhibited. There's a saving grace, though, in that attempts to "call back" the funding at the federal level were likely inhibited.

Basically...yes, there should have been more money in the first round, but more importantly there should have been a cutting of red tape to allow projects not through their EISes to actually get processed through in a timely manner...particularly where ridership analyses had been done this side of 2000 (especially since a lot of those studies are, let's face it, a shot in the dark that could be tweaked...or even just accepted with the proviso of being probable lowball figures given the ridership growth in the 2000s).

For what it's worth, while I'd criticize not going for some additional cars for the Acelas, I can at least understand not going for Acela IIs: At the time the equipment had been in service for well under a decade, after all. Not putting in a single-level coach order of some kind is far less excusable (the Amfleet Is were already over 30 years old and the Amfleet IIs getting there).


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