Former vice president Joe Biden is proposing to restore California’s now-defunct high-speed rail project — just months after Gov. Gavin Newsom pulled the plug, and President Donald Trump pulled the funding.
Biden formerly championed high-speed rail with President Barack Obama as part of the 2009 “stimulus” package.
Joel Fox, commenting on California’s widely-read Fox & Hounds blog, noted the provision in Biden’s new plan to tackle climate change (emphasis added):
- Spark the second great railroad revolution. Two centuries ago, the first great railroad expansion drove our industrial revolution. Today, the U.S. is lagging behind Europe and China in rail safety and speed. Biden will develop a plan to ensure that America has the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world – for both passengers and freight.
- With respect to passenger rail: He’ll start by putting the Northeast Corridor on higher speeds and shrinking the travel time from D.C. to New York by half – and build in conjunction with it a new, safer Hudson River Tunnel. He will make progress toward the completion of the California High Speed Rail project. He will expand the Northeast Corridor to the fast-growing South. Across the Midwest and the Great West, he will begin the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American.
- With respect to freight: A Biden Administration will pursue projects like a bridge that connects Oregon and Washington State that moves not only trucks but rail transit, and the completion of the CREATE project in Chicago that could cut in half the time it takes vital goods to move through the country. This plan will reduce pollution, help connect workers to quality jobs with shorter commutes, and spur investment in communities more efficiently connected to major metropolitan areas.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority originally planned to build a “bullet train” to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours. The Obama administration, which pushed high-speed rail nationwide, committed billions of dollars in funding to the project.
But the project ran into major engineering, financial, and political problems. Newsom told the California legislature in his “State of the State” address in February that completing the project “would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long,” though he hoped to complete a portion in the rural Central Valley.
President Donald Trump promptly demanded the federal money for the train be returned, and canceled $1 billion that was to have been spent on it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.