Because Obama is still talking HSR up, and he’s already in office, so this isn’t a campaign promise. :)

http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/31

Well, maybe he will – capitalism’s phases of self-destruction have been known to turn status quo politicians into progressives. But failing to criticize Obama’s New Democrat tendencies is not going to help.

On transit, I think there’s probably more reason for optimism, since here the interests of corporations and American power happen to be in line with progressive policies. I’d be surprised if Obama didn’t greatly increase transit and rail funding, but his repeated and exclusive references to “roads and bridges” have been sobering. We’re going to have to do a lot more than write on blogs if we want to push Obama in the right direction.

Building a national high speed rail network would be a major solution to all these problems at once. That’s a real bargain to be able to solve so many serious problems with one solution. We have laid out a plan for this called NEW DEAL 2009:
http://www.UrbanDesign.org/newdeal2009.html

President-elect Obama and President Clinton have very different characters and find themselves in significantly different situations, even though both have been left expensive Bush messes to clean up.

I think it would be more valuable to focus on the present than to imagine problems because of precedents of dubious importance.

One of the top priorities should be to fix the Amtrak bottleneck in Baltimore, about a mile from where I am sitting right now. There’s another big bottleneck in NYC, as I’m sure the author of this blog knows.

This might not be an “economic stimulus” plan, as the plans are not yet ready to go. But it should be a top priority.

-Chris, Baltimore

I wrote about this at the CA HSR blog, and had some more details to share about what happened in 1993 – potentially a foreshadowing of what might happen in 2009 if we don’t organize:

“Early 1993 saw a pitched battle between the new administration and moderate and conservative Democrats in the Congress who did not agree with Clinton’s new priorities, such as Clinton’s plans for a BTU tax – an early ’90s version of a carbon tax – and for an increased gas tax to pay for these projects. Conservative Dems in particular objected to new federal spending, forcing the Clinton Administration to climb down from its more ambitious goals in order to save the stimulus – which was already facing a filibuster from Senate Republicans.

Clinton never did get another opportunity to follow up on his HSR promises. After Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 election, Clinton had to acquiesce to many Republican budget cutting demands, especially on Amtrak. Clinton was able to get the Acela built, but because of Republican penny pinching they had to use the existing tracks and corridor, leaving the Acela short of being a true high speed rail system (in spite of that it is still a very successful service). The FRA did produce the HSR corridor plan but again with Republicans controlling the Congressional purse strings this never got beyond the conceptual stage. Meanwhile George W. Bush was killing the Texas HSR project and his brother was planning to do the same in Florida.”