US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood criticizes opposition to President Obama’s high speed rail initiatives

edited from TheHill.com :-

In an interview he gave with the Huffington Post as he prepares to leave office, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the U.S. has not invested enough in high-speed rail development because the Obama administration’s efforts have been stymied by congressional Republicans.

“Look, we are behind on high speed rail,” LaHood said, though he added that he was confident his eventual successor would continue pushing for rail funding. LaHood said high speed rail has come a long way, and that, “as long as President Obama is in the White House, whoever sits in this chair will have high speed rail as one of their top priorities.”

The Obama administration allocated $8 billion in the 2009 economic stimulus package to award to states to develop high speed rail. In 2011 governors in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin, who argued high-speed rail was a waste of taxpayer money, rejected the funds.

LaHood said Florida Governor Rick Scott’s rejection of the money was particularly galling. The Obama administration had offered more money to Florida than any other state aside from California for a high-speed line between Tampa and Orlando it hoped would be a centerpiece of a nationwide network of trains. The amount of money rejected by Scott was $2.4 billion, or 90 percent of the estimated construction costs. Scott argued shortly after taking office that the railroad would not generate enough revenue to cover its operations once it was built. However, Scott did approve the SunRail commuter rail line in the Orlando area.

LaHood, the only Republican in Obama’s cabinet, said he still disagreed with Scott’s diagnosis of the situation. “My thought was there is only one person in Florida who doesn’t want this money,” LaHood said of the Florida rejection. “He is a governor without a vision when it comes to transportation.”

“For the first time since people have been looking at infrastructure, America is behind,” LaHood said. “We are behind other countries because other countries are making the investments that we used to make. We got a two-year [highway] bill because they could only find $109 billion. We need to do better and we need to make sure that America does not fall further behind when it comes to infrastructure.”

"As members of Congress understand that the people are way, way ahead of them on this — they are way ahead of most members, certainly on the Republican side, when it comes to high-speed rail, or walking and biking paths, or livable, sustainable communities, green energy — the people are so far ahead of the politicians on this — eventually it will catch up with them," he said.

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(see earlier posts about the capacity strain affecting America's rail system)