Vice President Biden announced on Friday that the United States would be setting up a federal loan for Amtrak to expand its high-speed railway infrastructure. The program would begin with railways between Washington DC and Boston.
The new trains, which Amtrak expects to begin running in 2021, will have initial speeds of up to 160mph, but will be capable of speeds up to 186mph.
The new trains will have one-third more seating, increasing capacity by 40%.
"We need these kinds of investments to keep this region - and our whole country - moving, and to create new jobs," said Mr Biden.
This is part of a six year plan that Biden announced back in 2011, which promised $53 billion in high-speed rail investment. The almost $2.5 billion will go to twenty-eight high-speed trains, as well as long-needed safety upgrades to a railway system that is literally centuries old.
“You’d need seven more lanes on I-95, seven more lanes on I-95 to accommodate the traffic if Amtrak shut down.”
He says temporary train service blackouts, like during 9/11, show how critical passenger rail service is for the country.
Before we all buy our high-speed railway tickets and throw a party, there is still a ton of infrastructural work to be done and we need a legislative branch that is willing to budget our country’s needs over those of the wealthy few.
In 2013, the Federal Transit Administration estimated that there’s an eighty-six-billion-dollar backlog in deferred maintenance on the nation’s rail and bus lines. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives America’s over-all infrastructure a grade of D-plus, has said that we would need to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it up to snuff.
Vote blue and then vote bluer.