"Amtrak Joe" announced the administration's plan for investing in high-speed rail this morning. Photo: Brendan Polmer/CNN

To Vice President Joe Biden, high-speed rail isn’t just another administration initiative. He’s Mr. Amtrak. He gets it. Biden says he’s made 7,900 round trips between Wilmington and Washington on Amtrak. If each of those trips had been reduced by 10 minutes, he says, he would have had 55 more days to spend with his family or working.

So the vice president was a fitting ambassador to travel to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to announce a six-year plan to build a national high-speed rail network that will, the administration says, reach 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. The plan he outlined today would devote $8 billion to rail development next year.

“In the next 40 years, the United States is expected to increase in population by 100 million people,” Biden said. “Seventy percent of all people in America now live within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. You know how congested we are now. What happens with 100 million more, a significant portion of them along our coasts?”

Each day, he said, six times more people take a train than an airplane to get between Washington and Philadelphia. And more than twice as many people take the train between New York and Washington than fly. “How many more slots can the Philadelphia airport open?” Biden asked. “Airways can only take so much traffic in the lanes.”

“If you shut down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor,” Biden said, “you’d have to add seven new lanes to I-95 to accommodate the traffic.” He then went on to cite the cost-benefit analysis of building rail instead of road. The construction cost for an average linear mile of one lane through the city of Philadelphia ranges from $40-50 million. And one new runway, like the one Atlanta just built in its Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, costs $1.3 billion.

“When you talk about the investments we’re making in rail, they pale in comparison to investment you’d have to make in runways or highways,” Biden said. “And that’s before you factor in the environmental benefit of taking cars off the road.”

In a press release issued immediately after Biden’s speech, the White House said, “The proposal will place high-speed rail on equal footing with other surface transportation programs and revitalize America’s domestic rail manufacturing industry by dedicating $53 billion over six years to continue construction of a national high-speed and intercity passenger rail network.”

Six years is also the proposed duration of the next transportation authorization, which Congress is planning to start working on once they finish the FAA reauthorization, currently debating. The president’s budget is due to Congress Monday. He’s already said it will include his ideas for transportation funding for the next six years. Consider this the opening volley.

The plan announced today would start with $8 billion in the coming fiscal year. But Republicans are taking a slash-and-burn approach to the budget, and administration priorities like high-speed rail are high on the list of potential casualties. Where will the money come from, now that recovery act money is gone and Republicans are trying (and failing, but still trying) to go back to 2008 levels for discretionary spending. The White House press release doesn’t explain how it intends to come up with the money, or get such a proposal through an axe-happy House.

Nevertheless, the administration proposal is a good start. The plan is to focus on developing or improving core high-speed corridors as well as regional and “emerging” lines with slightly lower speeds, laying the foundation for future high-sped service and connect to existing high-speed corridors. It’s designed to include the private sector, a key goal of Transportation Committee Chair John Mica. And for the first time, it will separate the accounts for new rail capacity and state of good repair, depositing $4 billion in each at the outset.

Don’t expect this plan to sail through Congress. But as the administration continues to articulate and refine its vision for transformational infrastructure investment, it sets a high bar advocates can press lawmakers to reach for.

The Vice President and his wife share a tender moment — on the Acela. (Photo: NYT)

Biden
doesn’t get too political in the piece, eschewing calls for more Amtrak
funding in favor of a paean to the "emotional connection" he
experienced riding the rails during his 36-year congressional career.

But the vice president, who has taken on a central role in the White House’s high-speed rail push, closes with a strong endorsement of inter-city trains as pollution reducers:

Consider that if you shut down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, it is
estimated that to compensate for the loss, you’d have to add seven new
lanes of highway to Interstate 95. When you consider that it costs an
average of $30 million for one linear mile of one lane of highway, you
see what a sound investment rail travel is. And that’s before you
factor in the environmental benefits of keeping millions and millions
of cars off the road.

Photo: Sacramento Bee

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden, met with governors from eight different states that are competing for High Speed Rail funding.  Streetsblog’s D.C. Correspondent wrote a story about the national implications of the meeting available at our New York site.  While neither Schwarzenegger nor another representative from California was present, there was good news for California.  From today’s Times,

"The reason why California is looked at so closely — it’s been a
priority of your governor, it’s been a priority of your Legislature,
they’ve talked about it, a lot of planning has been done," Biden said
in a conference call with reporters.

The vice president said
the administration wants "to get shovel-ready projects out the door as
quickly as we can. . . . So California is in the game."

In other words, because California has been working on the San Francisco to San Diego High Speed Rail Corridor, and because voters put up funds for the project in the form of bond money; we have a leg up in applying for federal funds as the Obama Administration makes them available.

And let’s be clear, it’s not as though the entire corridor were "Shovel Ready" but there are two sets of track that the California High Speed Rail Authority says are ready to go.  The first is local, as the state could connect Los Angeles to Anaheim at a cost of $3 billion.  The second corridor would connect San Francisco to San Jose at somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion.

Back when the federal stimulus was first passed, Ben Fried out of our New York office wrote a pretty brutal takedown of the final bill that I re-posted at the LA Streetsblog.  Supporters of California High Speed Rail were upset for obvious reasons and I defended Fried’s post in the comments section by saying.

But that so much of the negotition was done in Harry Reid’s office (to
the point that Pelosi actually pitched a fit about it according to
Politico) and he’s already talking about funding for the gamblin’ train
to Las Vegas, I am mighty sceptical that much, if any, of that money is
going to end up being spent on the line we supported last fall. If it
does, I’ll do a mea culpa post and you can all "I told you so’d" me.
I’ve certainly been willing to do them in the past.

Well, let’s just say I’m not quite ready to eat crow just yet, but I got it marinating.  In this case, the crow would taste awfully good.