A Recent History of the American War on Passenger Rail Transportation

Baltimore's Red Line was not a flashy high-speed rail project or nationally contested infrastructure upgrade a la New York City's Access to the Region's Core plan. It was a mild light-rail line bridging the city's isolated and often impoverished west-side with its relatively opportunity-rich east side, in the process offering a crucial third leg to a transit stool consisting of a single pre-existing light rail (north-south) line and a single pre-existing subway line (northwest-southeast). For Baltimore, a city of 630,000 located less than an hour north of one of the nation's best subway networks, the Washington DC Metro, it seemed like not too much to ask.

After a decade of careful planning and analysis, millions of dollars in investment, and just weeks before crews were to actually break ground, Maryland's newly elected governor, a Republican no-name who oozed into one of the nation's most powerful gubernatorial seats courtesy of low voter turnout, nuked the project. Nothing was offered in the Red Line's stead and the governor was sure to note that he, on behalf of the state, had formally rejected the $900 million in federal funding the project was set to receive, effectively returning Baltimore to the very back of the line funding-wise and dooming any chances the city might have of a major transportation investment for at least a decade.

What happened in Maryland is hardly exceptional. One might even say that it's become something of a norm in the United States, as transit projects are greenlit and sometimes even already under-construction before abruptly being axed the moment the political wind shifts. It's an environment that not only dooms public transportation, but public infrastructure in general. The right's war on public investment will be won when advocates and planners start asking why bother? and, given the recent history of axed transportation projects below, it's difficult to argue that we're not there already. And, no, there is no Uber model for public transportation investment, not really.

Location: Baltimore

Years: 2002 - 2015

Cause of Death: Governor-initiated cancellation.

The Red Line was to traverse Baltimore from east to west along a 14 mile corridor including a new tunnel underneath the city's downtown core. By 2030 the Red Line was forecast to serve 54,000 people. It was to be the first major transit investment undertaken within the city after 20 years of neglect. On June 25, Governor Larry Hogan announced the project's tabling, calling the Red Line a "wasteful boondoggle." At the same time, Hogan announced plans to invest $2 billion in roads and highways in the state, tweeting a Maryland state map with Baltimore city conspicuously absent.

Location: New York, New Jersey

Years: 1995 - 2010

Cause of Death: Governor-initiated cancellation.

The ARC project would have doubled rail capacity underneath the Hudson River between Penn Station and New Jersey, allowing for a vast increase in the number of "one seat" (e.g. no connecting trains) commuter trips from Manhattan to locations served by New Jersey Transit's sprawling suburban rail network. It would have furthermore increased layover capacity for trains within Manhattan—currently, trains often have to return to New Jersey empty to wait for later Penn Station departures—further reducing delays attributed to the current, inadequate cross-river link.

Unlike Baltimore's Red Line, New Jersey had already begun receiving federal funding and had broken ground when Governor Chris Christie pulled the plug, citing rising costs and the likelihood of increased state spending on the project. The federal government wanted its money back, demanding a remittance of $271 million from the state of New Jersey, as required by federal law. Chris Christie, demonstrating an unwavering commitment to the sad cartoon fantasyland that is Chris Christie, refused, instead preferring to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars contesting the feds' demands in court. Where he (and New Jersey) lost hard. An agreement was eventually reached in which New Jersey would return $95 million and pledge to spend the rest of it on DOT-approved transit projects.

The ARC project has been superseded by Amtrak's Gateway Project, an $8 billion plan to replace the trans-Hudson tunnels and develop a high-speed rail link between Penn Station and Newark, New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy caused extensive damage to the inside walls of the existing tunnels, which will eventually need to be shut down for repairs—a potential catastrophe given that the two bores are already at capacity. President Obama has called the Gateway Project the most urgent transit project in America, which surely means that some halfwit will try to derail it.

Location: Miami - Tampa - Orlando

Years: 1992 - 2011

Cause of Death: Governor-initiated cancellation.

It's sort of hard to believe now that President Obama's high-speed rail initiative has become something of a punchline, but said initiative involved a lot of real money. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a $831 billion economic stimulus package passed as the American economy sank, offered $8 billion in federal investment for rail projects, with an emphasis on high-speed rail. Florida campaigned aggressively for these funds, hoping to revitalize a high-speed rail plan that was once mandated by a voter-approved state constitutional amendment (repealed in 2004 thanks in large part to the efforts of Jeb Bush). In 2010, it won $1.2 billion in federal dollars for the project, approximately half the cost of the high-speed rail line's first operating segment between Tampa and Orlando, with an additional $342 million coming later courtesy of federal rail funds rejected by Ohio and Wisconsin (below).

In 2011, Governor Rick Scott formally rejected the federal funding awarded to the state only a year before. Florida's $2.2 billion was then redistributed by the Federal Railroad Administration across 22 projects in 15 states.

Image: Midwest High-Speed Rail Association

Location: Madison - Milwaukee

Years: ? - ?

Cause of death: Governor-initiated cancellation.

Thank cool-guy Scott Walker for this one. In 2010, he rejected $810 million in federal funding for a high-speed rail link between Wisconsin's central nodes of Milwaukee and Madison. Like all of the ARRA-supported rail projects here, the state had campaigned for the money just a year before. It's important to emphasize that these aren't projects being dictated from Washington, but are usually voter-supported schemes long in development and even longer in demand. As in Baltimore, Wisconsin was a classic case of a rural- and suburban-supported governor fucking over blue-voting cities. Good work.

Amtrak is currently studying an upgraded corridor between the Twin Cities and Milwaukee and Chicago, which will come courtesy of rail investments undertaken mostly by Minnesota.

Image: Eisbrenner Public Relations

Location: Detroit

Years: 2006 - 2011, 2011 - ?

Cause of death: Debatable

Despite being the classic archetype of auto infrastructure, Detroit is a pretty reasonable place for urban passenger rail, owing in some part to its well-defined radial corridors. One of those is Woodward Avenue, the 12 o'clock spoke that traces from downtown Detroit through the city's university-dominated midtown to its trendier northern neighborhoods/inner suburbs. This was the route the M-1 light-rail/streetcar was supposed to follow for 9.3 miles and 19 stops. The route's projected cost was $500 million and the city sold $125 million in bonds toward that end, with $35 million more coming from the Kresge Foundation and $25 million from the federal government. Supposedly as the result of discussions between Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, and Governor Rick Snyder, the feds pulled funding for the project, declaring that the city did not have the capability of operating such a rail line and instead recommended a bus rapid transport system. The project existed for four months between initial approval and cancellation.

As a meager consolation prize, a consort of private developers is building a scaled-down version of the project with limited federal funding: a 3.3 mile streetcar running from downtown to midtown, connecting to at least the city's isolated Amtrak station, set to become a stop on Michigan's eventual high-speed rail trunk and a proposed commuter line. It will open in 2016.

Location: Ohio

Years: 2002 - 2010

Cause of Death: Governor-initiated cancellation.

This is exhausting, isn't it?

Ohio is currently barely served by passenger rail, offering a few stations on long-distance Amtrak routes connecting New York and Chicago. Cincinnati is served in each direction three times a week, while Cleveland is served by trains passing through only in the middle of the night. Columbus doesn't have shit.

The 3-C Corridor was to fix all of that—or start to, anyhow—connecting the state's three largest cities with rail service at least a few times a day. It was a modest plan and the federal government offered the state $15 million to make it happen, which, once again, was nuked by an incoming Republican governor, John Kasich, whose CV boasts time at both Fox News and Lehman Brothers. A true leader and hero of the common man, Kasich trumpeted, "[t]hat train is dead. I said it during the campaign. It is dead. Passenger rail is not in Ohio's future." In the black hole of the American right-wing, this is a boast.

Location: Colorado

Years: 2004 - ?

Cause of Death: Atrophy

Colorado's Front Range has in a very short amount of time become a sprawl crimescene stretching for hundreds of miles from the near-south of the state all the way to the Wyoming border. It is also catastrophically car-centric. Denver and its suburbs have made impressive efforts at developing rail mass transit, but the yawning subdivision void south along Interstate 25 is the heart of the right-wing Intermountain West, a population as likely to consider itself residents of the local megachurch as it is a heathen city or state. And the heart of this heart is Colorado Springs, a city of almost half a million that, until 2014, didn't offer bus service on Sundays. It's beautiful and horrible—I was born there!—featuring a comically regressive tax structure and an approach to city services that's made it a national punchline. Other right-wingy locales in the West have actually gone deep on rail transit (Phoenix and Salt Lake City, at least), but this one might be just too much.

Anyhow, Colorado Springs and Denver and the suburbs in between are growing together and will soon enough eclipse the sprawl nightmares of Arizona if they haven't already. Rail seems like a natural way to cope with that.

And so we have a mash of different groups studying and studying again prospects for commuter rail service between the cities, which would connect with rail services being developed between Denver and neighboring locales like Boulder and Golden. A 2010 study confirmed that a Front Range commuter rail line would indeed be feasible, but I can't find much more recent than 2013 about the proposed link's progress, but, hey, it's been proposed.

What did we learn here? Something is clearly broken, fundamentally, with how we do infrastructure in America. If a governor—one dude—can derail decades of planning and investment to woo his spoiled but disaffected base, then, you know, that's just it. We're fucked. It's not just our trains but everything else we might ever want to, as a society, invest in. In conclusion, try to not forget that there are those not just willing to but salivating at the thought of burning it all down.