Arriving at a fraught moment for transportation funding, the “High-Speed Rail: International Lessons for US Policy Makers’’ report from Cambridge’s Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and New York-area partners argues for the economic and land-use benefits of high-speed lines in the two regions, where distance and density best position bullet trains as alternatives to driving and flying.
“We see high-speed rail as a transformative investment … [but] we are not advocating that we should build high-speed trains between every city in America,’’ said Petra Todorovich, lead author and director of America 2050, a collaboration between the Lincoln Institute and New York’s Regional Plan Association to help the country better prepare for the 100 million additional residents projected in about 40 years.
The limitations of the nation’s rail network were underscored yesterday when the scheduled three-hour, 10-minute Amtrak Acela Express train carrying Todorovich to Boston arrived a half-hour late, dropping her at South Station just moments before the scheduled forum nearby.
The Acela trains, the closest thing the country has to high-speed rail, are capable of traveling 150 miles an hour but average less than half that, because of congestion and frequent curves; they also run late nearly 20 percent of the time.
An Amtrak proposal unveiled last year would shorten travel times from Boston to New York to two hours and New York to Washington to 90 minutes - but costs an estimated $117 billion over 30 years for design, permitting, land acquisition, and construction.
That may be a small fraction of the money invested in highways over the past half-century, but it dwarfs the initial $10 billion spent by the federal government on high-speed rail in the past two years - a broad banner under which money was spread throughout the country and invested in improving conventional rail as well as creating high-speed lines.
