Here’s the high speed rail net­work that Obama pro­posed yes­terday:

View Proposed USA High Speed Rail Network in a larger map

(I didn’t include the existing NY-​​Boston line)

As near as I can tell, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion isn’t actu­ally saying that this is what the final net­work would look like, they’re just announcing the exis­tence of a com­pe­ti­tion for some of the stim­ulus money, and assuming that the projects that will win are the the existing regional propo­si­tions. Which makes sense.

For com­par­ison, here’s a map of the existing Amtrak routes from MapMash.

(Sorry, too lazy to fight Google into showing them both on one page. Silly Google.)

A few things I notice:

• Not many cities which aren’t ser­viced by existing Amtrak routes would get added. So this would mainly amount to a speeding up of existing ser­vices, not new connections.
• The long sleepy run through the Great Plains isn’t going to get any shorter or invig­o­rating. No high-​​speed for you.
• Although it isn’t totally clear from the couple of regional plans I looked at, it doesn’t appear that aban­doned rail sta­tions cur­rently lying fallow in towns and small cities on these routes would be re-​​opened. Viarail in Canada does a better job of keeping smaller sta­tions open than Amtrak does in the US.

So this is prin­ci­pally about speeding up medium-​​distance inter-​​metropolis rail travel.

Some people are going to say that we want to encourage a focus on cities, because that’s where economies of scale of people and ideas gen­erate the most rich human exis­tence, as well as the most eco­log­i­cally sus­tain­able pop­u­la­tion den­si­ties. This plan looks to do that, so those people will be happy.

Other people may argue that fur­ther mar­gin­al­izing the rural areas and their asso­ci­ated small and medium towns and cities isn’t a good idea, when we’re facing a de-​​stabilization of the food system and prob­ably want to move people back into local adapt­able food­sheds. Those people might not be so happy.

I figure if it gets people into trains, that’s nat­u­rally going to lead to greater demand for scope and den­sity of con­nec­tions. High-​​speed rail on the Northeast Corridor today, regular-​​speed con­nec­tions across Nebraska tomorrow.