Texas T-Bone High-Speed Rail Plan Moves Forward
Published Oct 22, 2009
In the year 2020, how will Texans get from one side of the state to the other? Will they continue take a combination of country roads and highways, or hop short flights from here to there? Not if the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation has anything to do with it.
A not-for-profit corporation made up of transportation and elected officials from across Texas, the THSRTC is a grassroots effort to implement a high-speed rail system by 2020 in which trains running in excess of 200 miles per hour would move thousands of people at a time along a 440-mile corridor called the Texas T-Bone.
It means a new rail infrastructure, though it will be grade elevated whenever possible so farmers can run cattle and drive tractors underneath it. And its footprint is very small, requiring about 100 feet for the track itself.
“This isn’t just something we want to build because we want to build,” says Michael Parks, assistant executive director of the Brazos Valley Council of Governments. “Here in central Texas, we experience pretty heavy growth, yet our transportation system doesn’t have the money to keep pace with that growth. Eighty percent of Texas lives within 50 miles of a triangle created by Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. In a state like Texas, where your runs are within 300 miles of each other, air travel is probably a good way to get around, but given our growth, what’s the alternative? What technology is there that will allow us to grow if not for high-speed rail?”
Other benefits include airport connectivity from Dallas-Fort Worth to George Bush Intercontinental and the route includes Fort Hood, one of the largest military posts in the world. Servicemen and women and their families would reap the benefits in the form of more education, employment and recreation opportunities, plus easy access to numerous V.A. hospitals in San Antonio.
“There’s nothing else like it in the United States,” Parks says. “You have to look in Europe and the Far East and they’ve been doing it for quite some time. California has a high-speed rail initiative and it’s really a race to get things done. But Texas doesn’t have mountains to tunnel through or valleys to cross. It’s a relatively flat terrain and we can get speeds over 200 miles per hour, it’ll be like flying on the ground.”
Brazos County commissioner Kenny Mallard says the process has been slow but steady. “We’ve been working with the corporation for five years now, but after the spike in fuel prices, it became important for people to move forward instead of sitting on the interstate at $4 a gallon,” he says. “Of course, there are people who say, ‘Why would I want to take the train when I can drive my car?’ but most are excited about the low impact on the environment.”
To have everything built and ready to roll by 2020 may sound aggressive, but President Obama included $8 billion in high-speed rail funds into his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[cq] and his FY2010 budget has a proposed annual $1 billion investment for the development of a national high-speed rail network over the next five years.
“We have ambitious goals, but we’re planning now for a system that will last us the next 100 years,” Parks says. “The time to invest in our infrastructure is now.”
Story by Danny Bonvissuto
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