Published September 29, 2010

Imagine traveling to New York at 220 miles per hour.

Those of us who have made the perilous journey on a Fung Wah bus to New York can appreciate this: Amtrak has unveiled plans for a high-speed Northeast line that can get you there in an hour and 15 minutes. (The drive takes about four and a half hours.)

Amtrak would have to build new tracks, and the $117 billion proposal isn’t funded yet. Construction would begin as early as 2015, with the project slated for completion in 2040. So yeah, I’ll be 55. (Commenter Mike captures it: “This is a great idea, but can they reduce the construction schedule. We are so behind with high speed rail, starting in 2015 and ending in 2040 is a little sad.”)

Here are some of the lofty details from the news release:

High-speed train ridership would approach 18 million passengers with room to accommodate up to 80 million annually as demand increases in the years and decades that follow. Departures of high-speed trains would expand from an average of one to four per hour in each direction, with additional service in the peak periods, and total daily high-speed rail departures would increase from 42 today to as many as 148 in 2040.

The service would generate an annual operating surplus of approximately $900 million and its construction would create more than 40,000 full-time jobs annually over a 25-year construction period to build the new track, tunnels, bridges, stations, and other infrastructure.

D.C. blogger Matt Johnson says this would be “easily the most expensive rail project ever undertaken in this country.” But Matthew Yglesias laments:

Obviously, that’s a ton of money. But it also highlights the central problem with our current approach to rail. The Obama administration’s high-speed rail initiative is not only pretty stingy, it’s also spread incredibly thin because that’s what you get when you need to frame initiatives that can be approved by a congress based on representing distinct geographical areas.

In other words, Amtrak is depending on public-private funding to get this project off the ground, so to speak. And Congress would be hard-pressed to pass federal funding for something that will benefit just one section of the country.

It’s nice to dream.

Here’s the Amtrak report on Scribd, courtesy of NPR:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38345039/A-Vision-for-High-Speed-Rail-in-the-Northeast-Corridor