Editor's note: The official website of the White House recently announced that Biden announced that he will provide $8.2 billion for the construction of 10 major passenger rail projects in the United States, including the first high-speed rail project in the United States. According to the plan, the high-speed rail line will connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and the 218-mile (about 351 kilometers) journey will take 2 hours and 10 minutes, with a top speed of 321 kilometers per hour, and is expected to carry 11 million passengers per year. The project, called the "Guangming West Line", is built and operated by the private American railroad company "Liang Line", and can receive $3 billion in federal funding. Agence France-Presse said that during a previous trip to Las Vegas, Biden, who has a "train complex", said, "We are building the first high-speed rail line in the history of the United States." It starts here. According to Biden's vision, the first high-speed rail in the United States will be completed in 2028, in time for the Los Angeles Olympics that year. Previously, the construction of high-speed rail in the United States was full of twists and turns, but can it come out as scheduled?
The "high-speed rail dream" that has been shattered repeatedly
NBC reported that the U.S. has been slow to adopt high-speed rail technology and is not currently operating any high-speed rail lines, despite a growing number of experts arguing that it is of immediate interest and public support.
In fact, building high-speed rail is an "old dream" that has been shattered again and again in the United States. The first high-speed rail project in the United States only began construction a decade ago when Eurasian countries rushed into the era of high-speed rail, according to the report. In 2015, China and the United States announced that they would cooperate in the construction of the Western Express high-speed railway, but the project was unilaterally terminated by the United States the following year.
In 2008, when the famous movie star Schwarzenegger was the governor of California, he launched the California high-speed rail plan, which planned to shorten the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles to two and a half hours. What seemed ambitious at the time was the implementation of California Governor Brown and the $3.5 billion federal grant from former Obama. However, the dream of high-speed rail in the United States was shattered when the current California Governor Newsom first took office in 2019, and Newsom "stopped" the plan on the grounds that it was costly, time-consuming, and lacked oversight. The Los Angeles Times commented that abandoning the project is a sad mistake for California, the United States and the world, because high-speed rail has important social and economic value in terms of environmental protection, regional interconnection, and alleviating traffic pressure.
Newsom "halted" the California high-speed rail plan, but kept a section that had already begun. (Visual China).
The continuous stranding of high-speed rail projects has made the international ** talk about why the United States can't build high-speed rail?Some US media said that the two parties in the United States, which are deeply divided, have different opinions on the issue of high-speed rail. Agence France-Presse reported that the California high-speed rail construction plan has been opposed by Republicans in the state, and the former Trump withdrew federal support for California high-speed rail after taking office. Andy Conz, president of the American High-Speed Rail Association, once bluntly said that it was the U.S. oil chaebol that stumbled in it. He said that high-speed rail generally does not consume oil, so oil giants have been relying on their strong lobbying power for many years to prevent the federal ** from subsidizing the rail system, and the upfront investment in high-speed rail is very high, and it is difficult to build it without federal subsidies for private capital.
In addition, "* also believes that the lack of passenger traffic is also one of the important reasons for the slow development of high-speed rail in the United States. "Except for a few densely populated large cities on the east and west coasts of the United States, most areas are vast and sparsely populated, and there is no urban belt, so the construction of high-speed rail is not in line with the principle of maximizing economic benefits. ”
According to the New York Times, transportation policy experts and some bipartisan members also blame Obama for his missteps in not properly allocating funds. "Spreading the money across the country, rather than spending it in areas that are suitable for the development of high-speed rail, simply doesn't help. A well-known American transportation industry newsletter publisher said.
Song Guoyou, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times that the United States could not build a high-speed rail due to complex reasons, including the lack of sufficient budget for the long-term debt-ridden federal government, the political struggle between the two parties, and the inconsistency of federal and local goals.
* Qiang Ge, a professor at the Party School of the Party Construction Department, told the Global Times that compared with political factors such as party disputes, the more important reason is that the United States' infrastructure strength, industrial capacity and technological capacity have been greatly degraded. "California is a state absolutely controlled by the Democratic Party, and the federal government was willing to pay at the time, and the political pressure on the California high-speed rail project was not great, mainly due to aging technology and the possibility of environmental groups 'finding fault'. ”
The country on wheels "why insist on building high-speed rail?".
The U.S. has the highest car penetration rate in the world, and trains are not a regular mode of transportation for most people. So, as a "country on wheels", why does the United States insist on building high-speed rail?
According to Agence France-Presse, Biden made agitative remarks when introducing new rail investments, "How can we be the best economy without the best infrastructure in the world?"."Railroads have made the United States a force for business and innovation in the world, uniting the nation and building the most powerful economic circle in history." However, over time, we have fallen behind, and our infrastructure should be the best in the world. Biden also said that "we are in the midst of economic competition in the 21st century" and that "Chinese trains have been running at 350 kilometers per hour for some time."
The United States is clearly stimulated. Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times that American political and business elites and ordinary people who have come to China have felt the convenience of China's high-speed rail, which has become a symbol of a country's development level, so Biden also hopes to make a difference in the construction of high-speed rail to make up for the lack of the United States as an advanced economy and a leading country. Of course, Biden also has certain practical needs to build high-speed rail, and many railway facilities in the United States are very old and need to be updated. Song Guoyou told the Global Times that the reason why Biden wants to build high-speed rail is because infrastructure construction is an important means to increase employment. According to the White House documents, the "Bright Western Front" project will be created during the construction phase 350,000 jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs in operations and maintenance.
Reducing carbon emissions is also one of the purposes of Biden's launch of the project. According to AFP, Biden said that high-speed rail promotes environmental protection, and that future routes "will take 3 million cars off the highway."
According to Forbes magazine, White House infrastructure coordinator Mitch Landreou said that "this is a watershed moment in the history of American railroads" and that "as Biden often says, the United States should have world-class high-speed rail, which is an important capital for the United States to compete with China." According to him, the $8.2 billion grant comes from the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021 and is the largest U.S. investment in passenger rail since the founding of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation half a century ago.
According to the report, now high-speed rail is all over Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, especially China has 4A vast 370,000-kilometer high-speed rail network. At the same time, high-speed trains with speeds of more than 290 kilometers per hour are passing through the islands of Java in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. By contrast, the fastest train in the U.S. is Amtrak's Asile Express, which can reach a top speed of 241 kilometers per hour only on a handful of sections between Washington and Boston. Forbes believes that projects in California and Nevada could change the situation of the United States' backward high-speed rail.
The top speed is less than 250 kilometers per hour
Can you get out of the shadow of failure?
The U.S. plan to rebuild high-speed rail has attracted the attention of overseas companies. "Two European companies are competing for a $12 billion train order in the hope of finally making a big profit on high-speed rail in the United States. According to Wall Street, Germany's Siemens AG and France's Alstom are lobbying US lawmakers and Biden ** to compete for the opportunity to be the high-speed EMU and passenger compartment of the "Guangming West Line" train. Bright Line wants to secure nearly $4 billion from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in order to complete the financing plan and start construction by the end of the year.
The United States has repeatedly cast a "shadow" of failure on the construction of high-speed rail, so can the first high-speed rail in the United States come out as desired?"That's a big question mark. Rail projects in the U.S. are financed and implemented by private companies, and profit is their priority, Li said. However, the high-speed rail project does not have an immediate profit**, so the general private sector is reluctant to invest in infrastructure construction, and the state must inject funds. However, the United States has not formed an interest group as strong as the military-industrial complex, and it cannot make Congress continue to inject funds, which makes the construction of high-speed rail in the United States inevitably anticlimactic. According to Qiangge's analysis, if Trump takes office next year, there will definitely not be much interest in allocating federal funds to California, and the high-speed rail project will have to add a budget, so it will be difficult to complete.
Siemens, Alstom and other train manufacturers have long established manufacturing centers in the U.S. to produce and overhaul intercity, commuter and rail vehicles, and the prospect of true high-speed rail service in the U.S. remains slim despite efforts to stimulate the development of the high-speed rail industry, Wall Street commented. Taiwan's China Times News Network 9** said that railway experts believe that the United States has neglected railway construction for a long time, and it may take several generations of investment to build a high-speed rail network like Europe and East Asia.
In September this year, the Liangxian Railway Company has spread the news of the opening of the so-called "first high-speed railway". According to the Associated Press, the company began running high-speed trains between Miami and Orlando on Sept. 22 at speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour. However, Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao newspaper reported that American netizens complained that it was "not fast enough and the ticket price is too expensive." There are also ** who believe that according to the definition of the International Union of Railways, only trains with a speed of more than 250 kilometers per hour are eligible to be called "high-speed rail", and the speed of "high-speed rail" in Florida is "obviously failing".
Overseas "seditious" infrastructure plans may not be implemented.
Biden is drawing a blueprint for domestic high-speed rail while talking about large-scale overseas infrastructure plans. During the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, the United States signed an agreement with India, some countries in the Middle East and the European Union to build a rail network and sea routes that could connect the countries concerned. However, the United States did not give a specific timeline for the completion of the project.
Li Haidong said that from the planning of this plan, it can be judged that it is very unlikely to be implemented. It is impossible for the United States to use funds to provide public benefits to other countries, and although the rhetoric of the United States is very inflammatory, its domestic politics are short-sighted, which means that the funds promised by the United States are difficult to disburse.
This move by the United States is widely interpreted by the West as an attempt to counter the "Belt and Road" initiative. Song Guoyou told the Global Times, "China's high-speed rail is very attractive to other countries, so the United States may also want to build a high-speed rail model project to prove its high-speed rail technology and strength." ”
Song Guoyou said that both Trump and Biden have mentioned ambitious global infrastructure plans, but so far progress has been lackluster. Now that the United States and its allies have reached some consensus on funding and technology, and there may be breakthroughs in individual lines or individual infrastructure projects, it is still very difficult to achieve comprehensive connectivity.
*: Global Times.