Well, this is awkward. A week after Governor Doyle announces that's he's gone out bought two train sets from Spain, a new report from the Wisconsin center for Investigative journalism raises a series of questions about "high-speed" rail plans here.
Read between the lines: it screams "Boondoggle." Some of the findings:
It would reach downtown Milwaukee, but stop nearly six miles shy of downtown Madison.
Nobody knows how many people would ride.
Yet a proposed high-speed rail line linking Wisconsin’s two largest cities — with a price tag of half a billion dollars — remains at the heart of an intensive campaign by top state officials including Gov. Jim Doyle to land federal stimulus money....
But an investigation by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students found the state might not be quite ready for rail:
Wisconsin officials haven’t estimated how many passengers would use the system. In fact, state officials say they don’t know how many people currently commute along the route between Milwaukee and Madison. State transportation spokesman Christopher Klein countered that record ridership in Wisconsin on Amtrak, the nation’s passenger rail service, proves the state is ready for more. “Wisconsin doesn’t need to prove we want to ride trains,” Klein said. “We already have.”
Officials in four cities where stops are planned — Brookfield, Madison, Oconomowoc and Watertown — are enthusiastic supporters, but remain unaware of many of the details. Klein said Wisconsin is ahead of most states in planning, but cited a federal report that acknowledged some details aren’t worked out because “states have had little time to prepare for a … program for intercity passenger rail of this magnitude.”
Critics question the viability of the planned stop at the Madison airport, which is nearly six miles from the city’s major destinations. Klein said bringing the train downtown would add half an hour to the trip, which would be “extremely undesirable” for passengers not stopping in Madison.
Late last month, DOT officials told the Center that the state would request $13.8 million for a downtown Madison rail connection. But officials quickly removed the item from the cost estimates provided to the Center, saying the project wasn’t ready for inclusion — raising questions about how firm the state’s plans for passenger rail are.
Other benefits of such projects have been thrown into doubt by a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report that concluded rail projects would have “little impact on the congestion, environmental, energy and other issues that face the U.S. transportation system.”
The description “high-speed” is a misnomer. State transportation officials say the train likely would average about 70 miles per hour the first few years. The new passenger rail service, which would start running around 2013, will take one hour and seven minutes, which DOT officials say shaves an estimated 20 minutes off the driving trip between Wisconsin’s two largest cities when factoring in traffic. One online site that provides driving directions estimates the drive at one hour and 18 minutes. completes additional safety improvements. Doyle announced last week that Wisconsin will buy $47 million in new high-speed rail cars from Talgo for the existing Milwaukee-to-Chicago line. The company, which agreed to locate manufacturing and maintenance facilities in Wisconsin, would be the vendor for additional train sets if Wisconsin secures federal stimulus funding, the governor said. - 620 WTMJ
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