Obama high-speed rail plan – a bit timid?

First, only in the United States would “more than 150mph” be considered high speed. In Europe and Japan, you have to break 200mph to be talking high-speed rail.

Second, what is the cost of this pegged at? And, besides $8 billion in economic stimulus money, how much will you lay out and how soon?

Also, not connecting the Chicago and Northeast corridors (PDF) makes no sense. Nor does running a South Central corridor up to Little Rock, rather than keeping it Texas-only, if you’re not going to then run it up to St. Louis and connect it to the Chicago corridor. Ditto for running high-speed from New Orleans to Houston, then not connecting it to either Austin or San Antonio.

Also, why would you not connect the California and Pacific Northwest segments?

Stupidest of all, on that map, is not connecting the Eastern corridor to proposed high-speed rail inside Florida.

Let’s look at these in more detail, and in light of not planning 200mph, rather than 150mph, speeds on these trains.

Chicago-New York, for example, is 711 miles. At 200mph, that’s just over three hours. By plane, since you don’t get up to 550 mph that fast, it’s about 2:25, per Travelocity. To avoid airport hassles, etc., for an extra 30-40 minutes? No brainer.

By car miles, San Francisco-Seattle is about 100 miles more. So, bullet train vs. plane would probably be about 1:15 slower. Still a reasonable price to pay.