"We have tremendous distances compared with Japan or Europe," said Carlos Schwantes, a professor of transportation studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "We're just much bigger, and in so much of the country it's so low a population density that we'd have to ask the question: Is it worth spending our dollars for the infrastructure in those areas?"
Still, the federal stimulus package containing Senator John Kerry's $8 billion earmark for rail projects - with priority given to high-speed service - is the most significant surge toward building more high-speed rails. Federal funding for rail has rapidly declined over the past two decades.
The stimulus funding likely won't move high-speed rail planners far enough along to begin construction, but Kerry called the provision "a down payment" on a rail system that eventually could extend throughout the country. The Massachusetts Democrat said parts of the system could be completed within the decade if Congress continues to fund it.
"Spread out over the country, $8 billion will be an important amount of money to advance the engineering and design," said Peter Gertler, national public transit services director with HNTB, an engineering and architectural firm that has been involved in the Midwest high-speed rail project. But going forward, he said, high-speed rail authorities "will need more local funding at the private and state levels."
High-speed rail systems, which have been slow to catch on here, took off abroad with the help of huge government subsidies and gas prices that were more than double what American drivers were paying when prices here peaked last year, transportation researchers say.
Those conditions created a means and a motivation to support rail service that can travel at speeds upwards of 180 miles an hour in countries like France and Japan.
