Over on his new site, Green Building Chronicle, Ken Edelstein reports that only 24 members of the general public attended a GDOT meeting earlier this week considering route options of a potential high-speed train from Hartsfield-Jackson Airport to Chattanooga, TN.

Ken theorizes on why turn out was so low in Atlanta – general cynicism of transportation projects, no AJC coverage, a focus on other rail projects around Atlanta – but really I think it comes down to an unclear message of “Why exactly are we looking at high-speed rail to Chattanooga?”.   The recent $4 million grant to connect high-speed rail to Charlotte currently makes a lot more sense at first glance.  The map above shows that a Chattanooga line would only connect to Chicago in the “long-term”.

I’m not sure we can sell a rail line north on promises of quicker trips to Cleveland.

Over on Peach Pundit, one of their commentators suggested a couple days back that though new Republican governors in other states, like Wisconsin and Ohio, say they’re planning on rejecting hundreds of millions in already-awarded high-speed rail stimulus, lately Georgia Republicans have been singing a slightly different tune when it comes to some Georgia “rail projects”.

The post points specifically to recent Republican comments regarding a potential transit hub in “the Gulch” downtown.

U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Coweta County said he expects a highway bill next year “that will be able to authorize funds to beneficial projects, like this one, and I encourage GDOT to work to secure funding for this project in this bill.”

Previous transit critics also have come around, including DOT board member David Doss, who chairs the committee overseeing the hub’s development.

Though he still calls commuter trains “choo-choos,” he likes buses and high-speed rail for their potential to transform Georgia, and a transit hub would be a central location for those.

What’s pushing Georgia Republicans out of lock-step with their more traditional brethren?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is almost a day old now, but hey, us transit lovers are used to things taking a bit longer than usual, am I right??  (Ah, how I love self-flagellation.  Who needs enemies when you have yourself?).

Just days after receiving word that Atlanta would receive a lot of federal cash for its downtown streetcar, the state learned that it would be receiving $4.1 million to develop high-speed rail between Atlanta and Charlotte.  It seems like for all of Atlanta (and Georgia’s) mistakes in getting their railroady fingers on the fed’s transit money as of late, Atlanta’s location as a regional hub makes it sorta hard to ignore.

From the AJC…

North Carolina has invested heavily in rail programs over the past two decades, and in January, it won a $545 million grant to build high-speed rail. Florida has invested, too, and also won a $1.25 billion construction grant to partially fund a line from Tampa to Orlando. This week, the Obama administration will award Florida an additional $800 million for the line, according to U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

[U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood] added, “Whoever gets elected governor will be getting a phone call from me, really trying to figure out if Georgia’s going to be in the mix on high-speed intercity rail. They should be. They’re an important region of the country. We want them to be, but it’s going to take extraordinary leadership from the state.”

The Economist provides an interesting and different media perspective on the potential of a nationwide high-speed rail network in the U.S.

From the point-of-view of the freight rail companies, whose nationwide system The Economist calls “the world’s best”, the prospect of high-speed trains sharing the tracks they’ve held almost exclusive access to for decades, isn’t something to cheer about.

To sum up…

…the problem with America’s plans for high-speed rail is not their modesty. It is that even this limited ambition risks messing up the successful freight railways. Their owners worry that the plans will demand expensive train-control technology that freight traffic could do without. They fear a reduction in the capacity available to freight. Most of all they fret that the spending of federal money on upgrading their tracks will lead the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the industry watchdog, to impose tough conditions on them and, in effect, to reintroduce regulation of their operations. Attempts at re-regulation have been made in Congress in recent years, in response to rising freight rates. “The freight railroads feel they are under attack,” says Don Phillips, a rail expert in Virginia.

h/t: Thomas Wheatley

Aw heck…

Georgia appears to have won as little as $750,000 from the $8 billion pool of high-speed rail grants that President Obama was scheduled to announce this week…

The money to be announced Thursday would pay for three feasibility studies, at $250,000 each…

Last fall, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told a number of states, including Georgia and Florida, that they had better get their act together on rail transit or risk losing out on the high-speed rail grants. In a special session weeks later, Florida voted additional annual funding for one rail transit line and expedited buying track for another.

According to the AJC, it looks like Florida will be the big high-speed winner in the Southeast.  I guess the fed wasn’t all that concerned with investing in a state that could serve as a regional hub.

Or we just totally blew it.

h/t:  Terminal Station (actually I also used Ben’s cut-and-paste)