With just a month left before the Bush administration is history, the White House is making sure its privatizing ideology gets a toehold in the Northeast corridor.
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters brought the plan to Penn Station today at a news conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a couple of Congressional representatives.
The government is looking for private companies interested in building and running a super-high-speed rail line from New York to Washington.
The "Request for Proposals" requires interested companies to be able to run trains from Penn to Union Station in 2 hours or less, including stops. Amtrak's Acela currently does the trip in slightly less than three hours ... when it's on time.
Peters and Bloomberg waxed poetic about how other countries have high-speed rail that puts Acela to shame. What they didn't mention is that those systems were built with public money.
During its eight years in power, the Bush administration moved repeatedly to cut federal funding to Amtrak while advocating public-private partnership takeovers of popular routes like the Boston-NYC-Washington line and the San Diego-Los Angeles line.
Monday's proposal opens the door to those and other routes to be turned into high-speed rail corridors using private and public money.
When asked where the money would come from for such a staggeringly expensive project, Bloomberg said, "A year ago Congress passed a $150 billion stimulus program that essentially sent a check to every American who then spent it on a flat-screen TV made in a Chinese factory that has since closed, bought at Circuit City which has since gone bankrupt. Maybe we ought to try investing in infrastructure."
The crowd of people who gathered around to watch burst into applause.
In reality this entire proposal was included in the last rail-funding bill passed by Congress in October at the request of a Florida Republican with a long record of opposing federal funding for Amtrak.
The odds that whatever requests come back are actually acted on are probably fairly slim since there is expected to be lukewarm support for any privatizing schemes in an Obama administration.
Still, even local Democrats and rail advocates say that any focus on high-speed rail is a good thing.
