President Joe Biden is reportedly seeking to revive a project that would construct a high-speed railway from Houston to Dallas in Texas utilizing Japanese bullet trains.
According to a Reuters report on Tuesday, citing unnamed administration sources, the White House is looking to make an announcement on the project following talks between Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington, D.C., this week.
The Japanese government and the White House declined to comment on the report, though the project has seen renewed support from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who told KXAS in Fort Worth on Sunday: “We believe in this.”
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Texas signed up first because it has “bullet” in the title.
I’d prefer some other state to get it than Texas. If Texas is going to deny federal money for unemployment and for healthcare, then Texas doesn’t deserve federal money for other good projects.
And this is coming from someone in Texas who would benefit from it.
Texas GOP governor Greg Abbott has told state employees to try to avoid federal money because it might come with strings that require treating non rich and non whites as human.
Remember when Greg Abbott had a tantrum and basically shut down the Texas-Mexico border to most road traffic and fucked over all the rest of the US who was depending on products to come from Mexico?
Let Texas feel what it would be like to secede.
While I agree that Texas is not the most “deserving,” if it gets rapidly improving infrastructure it will probably at least flip into a swing state, with more liberals than fascists. “Punishing” them just lets them play victim.
I wish they were more than playing sometimes. If they’re going to claim persecution then we should persecute them a little.
It’ll get canned as soon as Texans realize it’s not called a bullet train because of any involvement with guns.
Plot twist. The train will be loaded into a giant gun and literally fired like a bullet because Texas.
I still think NYC-Chicago is the real test of high speed rail in this country. A route people want to take, that’s far enough to fly, between two cities where car ownership is optional.
I’m glad Dallas-Houston is happening but I wonder how much traffic it will get. In my midwestern mind they’re both just “texas big city”
It’s not surprising that the first city pair would be a commonly traveled route with cheap flat land in between. Once that’s demonstrated to work, they can start trying it for cities where the need to purchase rights for the route will be more expensive, and on terrain where long straight segments are more challenging to construct.
I wonder how much traffic it will get.
This source says average, about 24,000 people drive between the two cities any given day, and there are about 30 commercial flights per day between the cities. That sounds like a decent amount of potential demand.
But how walkable are Dallas and Houston? I think the success of this is predicated on that, because if people can’t get around without a car, they’ll take one with them.
Still though, pretty cool. Sucks it’ll be in Texas but progress is progress.
Dallas proper has some light rail around downtown with a couple lines that travel outward, and even a train that goes from Downtown Dallas to downtown Fort Worth. It’s still difficult to get to a lot of places outside downtown, the American Airlines Center, and the State Fair ground though.
Houston I think has some buses, but it would also be difficult to get too far from downtown.
Houston has some light rail also.
Depends on where you are, but with that 30 flight number there’s definitely plenty of people that aren’t bringing their cars with them.
Well fortunately we have Uber, so people can take Ubers around. It’s less energy efficient than each person having their own car, but it’s more parking efficient which leads to economic viability.
Are those flights because of hub relationships? Where it will still be somehow cheaper to fly with a hop than to fly direct out of the hub?
I once lived 1hr from an airport and 2hrs from a hub. It was always cheaper to drive to the closest airport and fly to the hub. Absolutely annoying.
Yes, a big chunk of the flight demand probably comes from the fact that each is a hub for a major airline (American Airlines has its big hub in DFW, and United has one of its major hubs in IAH).
Still there are a lot of flights between the two cities for passengers who are starting and stopping their journeys there.
So, let’s say such a train takes the same security as amtrack does, which is to say very little.
If the train is a viable option it would need to compete on time but there’s a caveat. The flight between the two cities is 2 and a half hours. Not including getting to the airport early, going through security, and waiting for your flight. So we can reasonably say it’s 4 and a half hours of down time.
The distance the train would travel is just over 700 miles. A 200 mile per hour bullet train at best possible speed does that in 4-5 hours. Assuming it’s express, and there are no delays.
If the train is faster and similar in cost it’s a no brainer, take the train every time. If it’s more expensive, which is will be if it isn’t subsidized, then it won’t succeed. People will see the longer travel time and not consider security and waiting around, and just buy the cheaper ticket. Then curse ass spirit air gets them stuck on the tarmac.
I’d pay more to take a train in many situations. Much more comfortable, less hassle, lower emissions.
You know they’d somehow figure out how to make it more uncomfortable to eek out more $$$ by fitting more people.
I’ve taken some of the longer train routes on the east coast, and they’re quite comfortable. Occasionally full, but it’s a lot easier to add space comfortably on a train by adding a car than it is in an aircraft.
Seems like a pretty pessimistic view…
It is. I don’t usually have a lot of faith in large scale projects
Depends how comfortable they make the train, too. Should be significantly better than coach on a plane.
I would be so down for this
Its the absolute most no brainer route for high speed rail in the US. Two metropolises with a combined population in the 10s of millions that are around 300 miles apart, minimum elevation changes on a straight route, largely empty space in between.
When it’s successful, you can hook it into fort worth pretty directly, and suddenly you have the core of a high speed rail network in a huge state that desperately needs it.
But I’m sure someone in the Texas government will say trains are “woke” and kill the project.
Time for Elon Musk to create a new vapour-ware like the boring tunnel to stop mass transplantation that will compete with his electric car empire
Maybe he’ll mass transplantate himself to Mars and take a few other sociopaths with him.
Gregg Abbott in a few weeks: “Trains?! Sounds like trans… No thanks, Biden!”
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bullet-train-abbott/
This fall (December 3, 2020), the project received approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration, and Governor Greg Abbott wrote a letter to the Japanese government, a key investor in the project, voicing his support. The potential benefits of the rail seemed manifold. It would offer travelers a ninety-minute alternative to the four-hour drive between Dallas and Houston and relieve highway congestion that’s projected to double by 2035. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And it would create thousands of high-paying jobs at a time when Texas is suffering from both a pandemic-related recession and an oil-price bust.
“The Texas High-Speed Train will be the first truly high-speed train in Texas and the United States, connecting North Texas, Houston and the Brazos Valley in less than 90 minutes, using the safest, most accessible, most efficient and environmentally friendly mass transportation system in the world today,” Texas Central spokesperson Erin Ragsdale wrote in a statement.
Abbott’s letter, however, sparked a firestorm among some of his longtime supporters. Even before the governor expressed support for the rail project, Meier said, her circle of friends had become increasingly wary of him because they believed he was pandering to liberal interests by imposing restrictions on some businesses during the early days of the pandemic. “I was the only one I know of that was still basically supporting him,” Meier said. “If he continues to support the [train], he will not get my vote, and I will passionately spread the word.”
Four days after Abbott penned his letter, his staff walked back his support, telling the Dallas Morning News that the governor intended to reevaluate his position out of concern for Texans’ property rights and because he was provided with “incomplete” information about the project.
Dude has been all over the map, chasing whichever way popular opinion has been blowing.
The only thing certain about conservatives is they will always make the worst possible choice. Always.
It could be that transforming the land value of an couple of abandoned malls into a hot property for developers will ultimately win Abbott over. There’s a lot of money that Texas routinely leaves on the table for ideological reasons, and as the domestic market cools off we’re seeing more push back from the business wing of the party to do real actual infrastructure projects rather than just squeezing rents out of the existing stock.
I could see that. Although, I do wonder when the party will be too far gone for the corporate billionaires to have any control left.
If you consider folks like Musk and Gates to be the modern corporate Pied Pipers, I might argue that it’s their increased control that’s driving people crazy
A bullet train? in my Texas?! That sounds like some east coast liberal anti-car woke socialism!!
We dont want none of that hippy dippy liberty stealing foreigner mass transit in our glorious state!
/s for the oblivious
To everyone outside if Texas: they’ve been talking about this for decades.
You know who will always find sneaky ways to sabotage it? The airlines.
Damn man, that engineer had a shitty day and probably some shitty pants after that one.
So people can get out of Texas faster?
I mean from Houston to Dallas, so it’ll probably be dependent on where they’re ultimately going.
Airport
Both cities have airports.
Texas has the second highest domestic migration in the country (second only to Florida). New York, Illinois and California (worst) have negative migration rates.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_net_migration
Good. Let them sleep in that bed.
Texas is getting a new bullet train soon.
Wait really? I never knew.
Man they’ve been trying to do this for years, but companies like Southwest lobby against it. Even Rick Perry was on board.
I would love to see it become a reality, but I’m skeptical.
Texas Monthly, 2015:
A Tale of Two Cities, a Bullet Train, and the Farmland in Between
Here’s a thought. Name your bullet train company like an oil company, call the bullet train the “oil pipeline”.
Each station can be named after gun or gun makers. Glock station, H&K transfer
Name them after famous 19th century American firearms inventors. Fuck all of them are now named after John Moses Browning.
The year is 2008 and Texas residents are being promised a bullet train.
The year is 2016 and Texas residents are being promised a bullet train.
The year is 2024 and Texas residents are being promised a bullet train.
Meanwhile, China has over 30,000 high-speed rail lines.
yeah but how many of them are bullet trains?
The correct numbers are 159,000km of rail lines, with 5,500 commuter stations. 45,000km of those rail lines support HSR (bullet trains), serving 980 stations with 76 different HSR lines.
But do they have a massive fossil fuel industry to prop up?!
China has 76 High-Speed Rail lines…
Surely you mean km, and the current number is 45,000km across 990 stations.
As of December 2022, it extends to 31 of the country’s 33 provincial-level administrative divisions and exceeds 40,000 km (25,000 mi) in total length, accounting for about two-thirds of the world’s high-speed rail tracks in commercial service.
Must be nice to live in a modern industrialized country.
I think you mean 30 million high speed rail lines
As much as I hate to admit it, The People’s Republic of Texastan kind-of makes sense as a starting point given the geography. If we can extend this to a nationwide network, it would be a very, very big deal.
