Government Technology - August 2007 - (Page 33)

narrow with many large and distant cities, common sense would seem to dictate that Floridians would like an option besides airlines to quickly travel from Miami to Tallahassee. In fact, in 2000, Florida voters passed an amendment to the state constitution requiring the state to build a high-speed rail system. So why doesn’t one exist? “In 2000, a gentleman by the name of [Charles] Doc Dockery in the Lakeland area, took it upon himself to push for a constitutional amendment [requiring high-speed rail be built] that he was able to put on the ballot with the appropriate number of signatures. It went on the ballot in 2000 and was approved by the Florida voters,” said Nazih Haddad, staff director of the Florida High Speed Rail Authority. With the amendment in the state constitution, the Florida High Speed Rail Authority was created. Soon afterward, the constitution but left the rail authority in place. The repeal passed with 64 percent approval. Many have speculated that the repeal amendment was worded to confuse voters who had so recently voted yes on the very same issue. “Some people will tell you due to some confusion in how the ballot initiative was written, a lot of people who thought they were voting for high-speed rail were actually voting for the repeal of the constitutional amendment,” Haddad said, adding that the governor had long opposed the idea of a high-speed rail. “The basic reasoning is it costs a lot of money — but any major transportation infrastructure costs a lot of money,” Haddad explained. “They were afraid the partnership with the private sector was not going to yield the benefits it [promised].” Once virtually set in stone, the promise of a Florida high-speed rail system has all but died. The rail authority last met in June 2005. History Repeated Florida isn’t the only story of a high-speed railway that nearly came into existence before being snuffed out by political wrangling. In a previous Government Technology article (Transportation’s Plan B, February 1992) it appeared that high-speed trains would be cropping up everywhere. “The era of the Interstate Highway System is over,” Roger Borg of the Federal Highway Administration was quoted as saying. The begin construction. Yet no tracks were ever laid and no trains were ever delivered. Why? Enter Southwest Airlines. The low-cost, Texas-based airline would have faced significant competition from a high-speed train, and the company invested in a massive lobbying and public relations campaign to discredit high-speed rail in Texas. It succeeded, and the project was scuttled in 1994, according to records of the Texas High Speed Rail Authority in the Texas State Archives. A decade before that, California took its first stab at building a high-speed rail system. In 1982, Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 3647, which called for $1.25 billion in tax-exempt bonds to build a Shinkansen-style train that would be managed privately and operated for profit. But by leaving the California Department of Transportation out of the loop, the proposed train drew the ire of many in government. In addition, ridership projections were found to have been largely overstated and connections with mysteri- “The basic reasoning is it cost a lot of money — but any major transportation infrastructure costs a lot of money.” Nazih Haddad, staff director, Florida High Speed Rail Authority The Shanghai Maglev Train is the ﬁrst commercial high-speed maglev — magnetic levitation transport — line in the world. Construction began in Germany with German technology in March 2001, ous Japanese contractors led to a loss and public of faith in the project, which quietly service began on Jan. 1, 2004. died in 1983. In those days, Mehdi Morshed and his wife Linda were the chief transportation consultants for the California Legislature. Though unable to make high-speed rail a reality in 1983, Mehdi Morshed would get another chance in 1996 when Gov. Gray Davis created the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA). Mehdi Morshed was appointed executive director of the authority and has been working once again to bring high-speed rail to the Golden State. But Mehdi Morshed and the CHSRA face yet another crossroads. They reportedly need $103 million to continue paying project engineers and to buy rights of way. Yet Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is offering only a fraction of the money requested — about enough to keep the lights on — until the CHSRA presents a way to fund the estimated $40 billion it costs to build a high-speed rail network that connects San Diego and Los Angeles to San Francisco and Sacramento. 33 authority went to work, looking first at a route between Tampa and Orlando. The authority believed a phased construction process would yield the best results and identified the Tampa-Orlando line as the optimal route to start with. After receiving two private-sector proposals in 2003, it was determined that the initial route would cost approximately $2.4 billion. All indications pointed toward Florida being the first state to finally build a high-speed rail system. But then, in early 2004, things began to unravel. The high cost of the rail system and its associated politics led to an effort to repeal the amendment passed just four years earlier. This effort, supported by former then-Gov. Jeb Bush, removed the mandate from the state story referenced a high-speed rail system in Texas that may have been even closer to being built than the Florida project. The Texas High Speed Rail Authority had, by 1992, awarded a $5 billion contract to a consortium known as Texas TGV. Texas TGV was headed by Morrison Knudsen, known as Washington Group International (recently acquired by URS), and was planning to use French TGV trains to service an area called the Texas Triangle — Houston, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. The Texas project was to be built entirely with private-sector money. When our article ran, the train was scheduled to begin operating by 1998. For Texas TGV, all that had to be done was to raise the funds necessary to http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - August 2007

Contents Point of View The Big Picture The Last Mile Letter to the Editor GT Spectrum Up Close Vanishing Act Way Back Machine Fast Track to Nowhere Best of Both Worlds Texting 911? GIS to Go Neighborhood Watch Two Cents Products Signal: Noise Government Solutions

Government Technology - August 2007

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