A 220 mph, high-speed train may one day link Boston and New York under a $117 billion plan announced by Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
The plan is set to be accomplished over a 30-year time frame and would cut travel times between East Coast cities in half. For example, travelers would be able to go from New York City to Washington, D.C., in just a little over an hour and a half, and from the Big Apple to Boston in just 86 minutes.
Currently, it takes almost three hours to travel from New York to the capital, and it takes close to four hours to travel between New York and Boston, says Amtrak.
Other hubs to be linked by high-speed rail on the highly trafficked northeast corridor include Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Around 12 million people use Amtrak to travel up and down the northeast corridor every year. The new plan envisions those numbers rising to about 33.7 million passengers a year by 2040, as more people opt to use high-speed rail over airline travel.
The plan would also make an estimated $900 million per year and generate thousands of jobs. A new high-speed rail system would require 44,000 construction jobs annually over the 30-year time span and lead to 120,000 permanent jobs, Amtrak says.
But the proposal is still in its concept stage and has several notable hurdles in its way. For one thing, the plan would require building an entirely new set of rail tracks between Boston and Washington, D.C.
That will be expensive. Over the next three decades, the plan averages out to about $4 billion a year.
Amtrak’s total budget last year was around $3.5 billion, so the plan would almost double its budget.
The proposal also has no funding plan in place, but Amtrak hopes that a combination of public and private investment will be in place by the time the plan is expected to start construction in 2015.
The high-speed plan should also gain some of the $8 billion promised to Amtrak by the Obama Administration. The money, coming from the 2009 economic stimulus package, is being spread amongst the states to develop high-speed rail service.
Already Amtrak receives $1.49 billion from the federal government each year with $655 million of that money being spent on capital projects.
Despite the hurdles that face the project, Amtrak officials stress that though money is a concern, the organization wanted to present their vision for a united seaboard in order to generate interest and, hopefully, investors.
By Adriana Padilla for PeterGreenberg.com.
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