Florida high-speed rail is a pipe dream and bad idea — for now
May 26, 2009 at 6:46 am by Wayne Garcia
I was on Rob Lorei’s Florida This Week last Friday and was asked to lead off discussion of Florida’s chances of getting high-speed rail. I was taken by surprise, because I had studied Barack Obama’s stimulus plan extensively, especially its engineering aspects, for a freelance piece I did for the UF Engineering College alumni magazine and didn’t remember any money being set aside for high-speed rail in Florida.
It turns out that even Obama himself mentioned Florida as a possible recipient in a recent speech. But I’m guessing that it’s more of a hope than a reality, and a South Florida Sun-Sentinel story lays out the problems with Florida being competitive for some of $8 billion set aside in stimulus dollars for a Miami-Orlando-Tampa high-speed train:
Working against Florida: Once you get off the train, you might not have another way to get around.
Corridors with links to other means of transit have the best chance to get federal money.
“If you’re going to do high-speed rail, you can’t connect it into a sand lot or an empty field,” said U.S. Rep. John Mica, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
South Florida’s Tri-Rail is the only such connection, but Tri-Rail is on shaky ground. Florida’s odds diminished when the Legislature didn’t approve a new 61.5-mile commuter rail line to run through Orlando. Tri-Rail faces the threat of a possible shutdown in two years after legislators also said no to Tri-Rail’s pleas for more money to cover operating costs.
“We’re up against 27 metro areas [to be served by the competing nine lines]. Only three do not have fixed transit systems and two are in Florida — Tampa and Orlando,” said Mica, of Winter Park.
Also working against Florida: the lack of even preliminary engineering for such a line and the fact that voters in 2003 specifically turned down such an endeavor. This state high-speed rail project is a bad idea for now, and that comes from somebody who supports rail transit in Tampa Bay and the proposed Orlando SunRail project (at least in concept). And that is the biggest problem with competing for stimulus dollars; it puts the cart before the horse. We need working mass transportation in Florida’s urban areas. To accomplish that, we also need to rezone and re-imagine our urban areas, increasing densities and making mass transit work by having dense nodes of residential-mixed use neighborhoods that don’t exist today in our sprawl model.
It doesn’t help when you have anti-growth management and anti-urban bills course through the Legislature every year, like the SB 360 bill on Charlie Crist’s desk right now.
Oh, one more thing, given the many many years it would take before we got to building a high-speed rail, how is that an appropriate use of dollars to stimulate us in the recession now??
