![]() ![]() CALIFORNIA HIGH-SPEED RAIL AUTHORITYĬalifornia has no monopoly on high-speed dreams. San Joaquin River Viaduct, Madera County, California. Future track improvements should increase that even further. Amtrak is upgrading the Acela fleet on its profitable Northeast Corridor between New York and Boston with new Alstom trains that will boost speeds to 160 mph. is Amtrak’s Acela service between New York and Washington, topping out at 150 mph. While many of those trains run at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, the fastest line in the U.S. ![]() “There’s no shortage of suppliers.”Īuto-obsessed America is a global laggard in high-speed rail, a service widely available across Europe, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, which pioneered the technology six decades ago. “There’s several other train manufacturers, from around Asia and the world, building high-speed trains,” Kelly said. Companies including Siemens, which has a passenger-train factory in Sacramento, and Alstom, which builds them at East Coast plants, both have Amtrak contracts and will likely compete for California’s business. Orders for the first trains could go out as soon as next year. “Those six different pots total about $70 billion over the next five years.” “We identified out of the infrastructure bill six different programs that we can compete in for different project elements,” Kelly told Forbes. While the Build Back Better infrastructure money was never approved, there’s a pool of other new federal money California can tap for future needs. The California project, which estimates travel time between San Francisco and Los Angeles will be less than three hours, also receives about $1 billion annually from the state’s Cap and Trade program, a de facto carbon tax on major emitters of greenhouse gasses. Longtime train commuter President Joe Biden restored those funds in 2021 and wants more bullet-train projects, both for the jobs they’ll generate and to help cut climate-warming emissions from cars. ![]() It’s a big shift from a few years ago when then President Donald Trump withheld $929 million of federal funds awarded years earlier and threatened to claw back $2.5 billion doled out by the Obama Administration. That victory and recent funding developments give the train a degree of stability for the time being. CALIFORNIA HIGH-SPEED RAIL AUTHORITYĬalifornia’s Court of Appeals ruled against Flashman late last year, allowing construction to continue. ![]()
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