As President-elect Donald Trump gets ready to take office and state GOP lawmakers are determined to put up obstacles to rail returning to Austin next month, the elusive goal of high-speed rail in Texas has grown more hazy.
Texas’s aspirations for high-speed rail have shown some life over the past two years. Amtrak brought the long-delayed high-speed train line between Dallas and Houston back to life and took the lead. The notion of extending the line to Fort Worth and Arlington was promoted by transportation planners in North Texas. Increased traffic on Texas interstates and an excess of federal transportation funds under President Joe Biden’s administration led some local officials to argue for expanding even traditional passenger train between the state’s largest cities.
It’s unclear where those initiatives will go under a second Trump administration. After the Biden administration supported federal financial backing for train expansion, rail supporters and analysts say Trump has not given many indications about his plans for high-speed rail during his second term.
However, when lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature meet in January, anti-rail initiatives are sure to continue.
There are still some train supporters who have optimism. For starters, traffic on Texas roads has been unbearable despite the state’s strong economic expansion. According to Peter LeCody, the director of Texas Rail Advocates, state lawmakers may be open to considering rail options if they combine it with an anticipated $20 billion budget surplus.
“This might be a turning point where the Legislature is starting to wake up and smell the vehicle fumes,” LeCody stated.
Legislators are working to establish the framework for a high-speed rail expansion throughout the entire state. State Representative John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin, presented a bill that would instruct the Texas Department of Transportation to expedite the construction of a high-speed rail line along the crowded Interstate 35 corridor between Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. In order to construct, maintain, and run the line—which would need to reach speeds of at least 110 miles per hour—the state agency would need to sign a complete development deal with a private corporation.
According to Bucy, there are currently no plans for such a train, and it’s unclear who would run it.
Additional state funding for high-speed rail, along with other forms of transportation including regular passenger train, bike lanes, and pedestrian routes, would be made possible by another Bucy law. The majority of TxDOT’s funding must go toward constructing and enlarging freeways, under the Texas Constitution. Voters in Texas will have to decide whether to change the constitution to permit a larger portion of those funds to be used for modes of transportation other than highways if Bucy’s plan is approved.
“We need to be able to move people,” Bucy once stated during an interview. “We need to give people other options.”
The long-desired Texas Central high-speed rail project between Dallas and Houston is still uncertain. The proposal, which was first proposed in 2009, would transport people at top speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, reducing the current 3.5-hour vehicle travel to a 90-minute train ride.
The line would make use of the same technology used on Japan’s renowned high-speed rail system, which links the main employment hubs of that nation. There, a 16-car train can accommodate almost 1,300 people at once.
After Texas Central lost leadership and struggled to secure the land needed to build the line, Amtrak brought the project back to life last year. According to Amtrak officials, the Dallas to Houston route meets several requirements for high-speed rail, including connecting two of the nation’s most populous metropolitan areas and being sufficiently level to enable trains to achieve the speed required to make the trip reasonably quick.
In the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature, where members are opposed to passenger rail and have specifically worked to halt the Texas Central project, high-speed rail ideas have long faced a hard uphill struggle. Texas Republicans have attempted to stop state tax funds from funding high-speed rail and thwart attempts to use eminent domain to grab the land required to build it, including Governor Greg Abbott, who originally championed the Texas Central idea.
In 2017, lawmakers passed a measure that would prevent Texas Central from using public funds to construct high-speed rail.
State Senator Robert Nichols, a Republican from East Texas and the head of the state Senate Transportation Committee, stated, “I’m okay with the Texas Central line if it can be constructed without the use of federal or state funds or the taking of private property.” “But they can’t, that’s the answer.”… It would be a completely different matter if it were an investment that would yield large dividends. There will be no dividends on the investment. It’s a huge expense that has no end in sight.
Next year, that resistance seems likely to continue. Proposals have been made by Republican lawmakers to further codify barriers to high-speed rail. State Representative Cody Harris, a Republican from Palestine, submitted a bill that would prohibit state legislators from allocating funding for any purpose involving privately run high-speed rail.
State Representative Brian Harrison, a Republican from Waxahachie, has another bill that would overturn a 2022 ruling by the Texas Supreme Court that gave Texas Central the authority to take land needed to construct the Dallas-to-Houston line. This ruling worried landowners in East Texas along the route’s anticipated course.
“I am committed to protecting my constituents private property rights from the forced taking of their land for this wasteful boondoggle project,” Harrison said in a press release.
It’s unclear how those GOP suggestions would impact the construction of other high-speed rail lines or the development of the Texas Central line now that Amtrak is leading the project.
It’s hard to see how the Texas Central line could be constructed without state funding, according to experts and rail supporters. Originally estimated to cost $12 billion, the Dallas-to-Houston route is now expected to cost over $30 billion, with both public and private funding being required.
Eric Goldwyn, program director of New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, stated, “This project requires tens of billions of dollars and we don’t appear to be close to that.”
Amtrak’s senior vice president of high-speed rail development, Andy Byford, stated in November that the project has not received government permission and that officials are still determining how to pay for it.
Earlier this year, Byford told reporters that Texas Central had already purchased roughly 30% of the land required to construct the line, and that eminent domain would only be used as a last resort to acquire the remaining area.
The goal of officials is to build a high-speed rail line between Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth using only private funding. According to Michael Morris, the North Central Texas Council of Governments’ director of transportation, if the route receives federal approval, he anticipates interest from private rail companies like Brightline, which owns a route that connects Orlando and Miami and is working on a high-speed route between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
According to Morris, such a scheme would ease traffic and increase highway safety while fostering economic growth in the form of residences, workplaces, and dining establishments close to stations in every city.
Morris also stated that he intends to urge state legislators to establish a new state agency that is exclusively dedicated to high-speed rail initiatives.
How Trump would handle passenger rail in his second term is another unknown.
Biden would eventually restore the more than $900 million in federal funds that Trump had canceled during his first term to help support California’s struggling high-speed train network between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Vivek Ramaswamy is a businessman. This week, Trump, who was appointed to spearhead an initiative with Tesla CEO Elon Musk to reduce federal regulations and government spending, demanded that federal funding for the California line be discontinued, calling it a “wasteful vanity project.”
This year, Trump changed his tone throughout the campaign trail by publicly questioning why the US doesn’t have its own high-speed rail system.
“We don’t have anything like that in this country. They travel incredibly rapidly and comfortably without any issues. Trump remarked, “Not even close,” in an interview with Musk that was posted on the social media platform X. “And it doesn t make sense that we don t, doesn t make sense.”
State and local officials are searching for alternatives to high-speed rail that will allow Texans to travel throughout the state more easily and reduce traffic on the state’s increasingly congested interstates.
TxDOT is investigating ways to expand passenger train service on an existing Amtrak line from Houston to San Antonio using federal funds. In addition to the high-speed proposal, Texas transportation authorities are researching the possibility of reestablishing a traditional Amtrak line between Houston and Dallas.
Officials in Travis and Bexar counties have resumed attempts to increase passenger rail frequency between the Austin and San Antonio regions amid the Interstate 35 corridor’s strong growth.
State and municipal leaders should support initiatives to make metropolitan areas more accessible and simpler to navigate by bicycle or public transportation, Goldwyn added, adding that increasing passenger rail of any kind is insufficient to reduce overall congestion.
Railroad travel “is one tool we can use to help solve that problem, but we need to do a lot of other things as well,” he stated.
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