It’s time for Texans to hop on high-speed train to the future
Time to get aboard the Texas Central Railroad.
Every Texan should celebrate the Federal Railroad Administration’s greenlight of a truly transformative project that will create jobs, protect the environment, and attract billions of dollars of investment. If you are grateful to previous generations for building the Interstate Highway System, you should support high-speed rail.
Texas Central needs all the help it can get. Cranky landowners, unsavory lobbyists and pandering politicians have been sabotaging high-speed rail in Texas since the late 1980s. And every year they delay Texas building an advanced passenger rail system, they hurt the state’s economic future.
Nostalgia is not the basis for my love of trains. I’ve lived and traveled extensively in Europe, Japan and the Northeast Corridor. I’ve enjoyed the convenience of France’s TGV, Japan’s Shinkansen and Amtrak’s Acela.
Watching the countryside blur at 200 miles per hour is far more enjoyable and convenient
than driving yourself or packing onto an airplane. High-speed internet service turns a four-hour slog into 90 minutes of productive work.
But even if you never ride the train, building critical infrastructure that will last more than 100 years spurs economic development.
Texas Central plans to spend $20 billion in privately raised money to build a new track from Houston to Dallas. Construction will employ thousands of people for years, and daily operations will employ hundreds more.
Once successful, the company will not stop with one line. The logical expansion includes lines from Dallas to San Antonio, with a new station in Austin. Completing the triangle back to Houston creates a state-shrinking circuit.
The demand for such a train network is apparent. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines offer 25 nonstop flights from Houston to Dallas, and the Vonlane luxury bus service offers three departure times. Even more people make the drive.
Environmentalists should leap at the chance to move people out of fossil-fuel vehicles and onto electric-powered trains. As the amount of renewable energy on the Texas grid grows, the cleaner train travel will become.
Raised railways will take away agricultural land and could cause flooding if not correctly engineered. Laying track across the state will create local headaches, and some landowners have already promised more lawsuits. Anytime humans change the landscape, there will be consequences.
Moving people onto rails, though, will reduce demand for additional highway lanes and airport runways. Train travel is considerably less polluting than airlines or autos.
The more significant long-term benefit is the creation of new businesses and investments.
Texas Central has hired Italian construction giant Salini Impregilo to lay the high-tech rails. It will purchase the trains from Central Japan Railway and contract Spanish rail operator Renfe to run the show.
Those companies will hire hundreds of Texas subcontractors and workers, and when other states build their high-speed rail, Texas companies will take their newly acquired expertise across the country.
Unfortunately, a bunch of curmudgeons and entrenched incumbents want to prevent Texans from seizing these opportunities. They fear change and don’t like competition.
Farmers and ranchers say they do not want electric trains whizzing past their property, complaining it will ruin the character of their rural communities.
Clairvoyant critics argue not enough people will use the system to justify the disruption or expense. Even though Texas Central does not rely on taxpayer money, unlike California’s HighSpeed Rail project, fiscal hawks predict that if the company goes bankrupt, it will go to Congress with hat in hand.
Previous generations made the same arguments against the Interstate Highway System, which happens to rely on fuel taxes. The naysayers were wrong then and they are wrong now.
Most days, I’d expect Republicans to rejoice when a private firm offered to invest billions in Texas. They’d be thrilled to demonstrate that private enterprise in Texas can outperform a publicfinanced California highspeed rail project.
Sadly, Republican lawmakers are not as committed to limited regulation and free enterprise as they claim, caving in to the regressive demands of rural GOP primary voters. U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, is trying to derail the project, and state Rep. Ben Leman, R-Brenham, is spreading disinformation produced by activist groups with hidden funders.
This is another case of hypocritical NIMBYism. The same people who support pipelines and highways cutting through other people’s private property get worked up when Texas Central tries to leverage rights granted to railroads since the 19th century.
No state in the nation is better suited than Texas for high-speed rail. Real estate developers, airlines and auto dealerships have killed past projects to protect their profits. Let’s not let those forces retard Texas’ chance to become a national leader in the transportation mode of the future.