High-speed rail project steaming ahead
Plan that would use eminent domain to grab land to snake through farms looks like a great train robbery
People often forget the main theme of the Steve Goodman-penned, nostalgia-fueled ode to Amtrak, “The City of New Orleans.” At the time of the song, railroads were outmoded forms of transportation (15cars and 15restless riders) and nearly dead. In 1971.
The Texas Central Railway still ain’t heard the news.
As noted in a story in the Chronicle (“Progress vs. preservation,” Page A1, Feb. 18), the private consortium of investors attempting to build a “bullet train” between Houston and Dallas faces opposition on a number of fronts, but mostly by the owners of the land they want to snake the rail line through.
Literally and figuratively, this disoriented express has chosen the wrong path.
Though a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, Texas Central plans a 240-mile wayward journey that cuts through private lands well west of Interstate 45 with a stop in Grimes County to attract traveling Aggies and escaped convicts.
U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady of The Woodlands (not on the route), among others, have questioned why the train can’t travel along the Interstate carved out since the early 1970s. That would at least allow a stop at the Buc-Ee’s in Madisonville for some turkey jerky and a frozen Dr Pepper.
Brady also opposes any use of eminent domain, the land grab that worries ranchers, farmers and other landowners in the flyover counties between Texas’ two largest cities. He should. As should all politicians who recognize that the bulk of Texan philosophy revolves around a “get off my land” attitude. The landowners along the way are loudly showing that sentiment.
As reported in the Chronicle, anti-appropriation folk in Waller, Grimes, Leon, Limestone, Navarro and Ellis counties have decried tactics by Texas Central “ranging from vague economic projections to a lack of public scrutiny, in addition to what they see as aggressive efforts to enter private lands to conduct surveys.”
Citizens around the area also have expressed concern that the rail would destroy the ambience of their communities, but that is a less obvious concern. The denizens of the Shady Rest Hotel were unchanged by the train between Hooterville and Pixley, after all.
Far be it for anyone to condemn a privately-funded folly like the Houston-Dallas bullet train (interestingly up in that self-centered city to the north, they call it the Dallas-Houston bullet train). But the threat of using federal directives to give Texas Central eminent domain authority — despite state efforts to block those maneuvers — is chilling.
The people between Houston and Dallas do not deserve to have permanent scars gouged into their family land without their approval. Especially not for something as uncertain as private high-speed rail.
Travelers between the two big cities could use some relief. I-45 is often packed and full of speed traps in all those little towns after you get through Corsicana.
But rail exists as a solution only in the minds of grandiose civic planners and amid the ashen pages of an Ayn Rand novel. A 90-minute train ride will doubtfully change lives when a 60-minute Southwest Airlines flight (at a similar cost) suffices.
Only in rail infrastructure do we buy into the concept that using a 200-year-old technology represents progress.
Sure, elected officials love to point to train tracks and say “look what I did,” but myriad rail projects around the U.S. (excepting the northeast corridor) have been met with a resounding “meh.”
Despite spending billions on rail, multiple reports show decreased use of mass transit. Ridership gains in Houston are attributed in several reports to the 2015 redesign of bus routes, not the light rail.
Amtrak, the beleaguered semi-public rail system that never seems to meet financial goals, says it carried 31.3 million passengers in 2016, though about two-thirds of those were traveling around the cluster of large cities in the northeast. That leaves about 7.8 million riders for the year across the rest of the country, which is pretty big.
The Federal Railroad Administration estimates 7.2 million riders per year on the Houston-Dallas bullet train, a figure about 10 ten times the number of people who jet between the two cities each year. Texas Central itself claims it will tally 10 million riders by 2050.
Those numbers seem a bit up in the sky. Like most of the folks who need to get to Dallas in a hurry. Even the Acela Express, a quasi-high-speed line in the railroad-crazy Northeast Corridor, only carries about 3.4 million people a year.
Texas Central also estimates that travelers will save an hour of travel time between Houston and Dallas. As if anyone wants to get to Dallas an hour earlier than necessary. There is a certain steampunk romance to riding the rail, until you actually do it in the modern era. Thoughts of seeing the countryside along the way are replaced with a view of the shrubbery on either side of the tracks.
The luxury in memory and movies likewise no longer exists. Passengers can freely move about the cars, but they’re only going to see rows of seats resembling every other mode of mass transportation. It’s less Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flirting over a meal at a comfortable table in the dining car, more Joe Buck catching a Greyhound to New York City.