David Hoppe

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:: High-Speed rail to Gov. Daniels:

History is now

By David Hoppe

In 2007, as he prepared for his second race for governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels traveled to DePauw University for a public interview in which he reflected on his first term in office. Using language that prefigured the message of another candidate at that time – Barack Obama – Daniels characterized his administration’s penchant for doing a lot of things at once this way: “We were people of change and we were going to bring it.”

He continued, “We’ll try a lot of things and some of them won’t work, and if they don’t we’ll go back and fix them, but we won’t sit still.”

Daniels concluded by saying that this approach created what he called, “an interesting time in the history of our state.”

It’s Daniels’ belief in himself as a change agent, as someone able to interpret and get ahead of history, which has made his one-track mindedness about transportation so confounding.
To hear Mitch Daniels talk, you’d think gas was still 50 cents a gallon and that whenever you needed to fill ‘er up, a smiling pump jockey would be at your service to wash your windshield and check your oil at no extra charge.

That’s because Daniels’ transportation policy has amounted to one thing: highways. It appears our governor has never seen a highway he didn’t think could be wider, longer or too expensive.

This is beginning to look like a serious blind spot on Daniels’ part because that other guy – make that <I>President</I> Obama now – has allocated $8 billion for high-speed rail construction as part of his economic stimulus package, with another $5 billion budgeted for rail over the next five years. In June, the Department of Transportation will tell states how to apply for the money.

This news has electrified the leaders of our neighboring states. In Ohio and Illinois plans are underway regarding routes for a Midwestern rail network connecting Chicago with Cleveland and Cincinnati. Studies have also been done for routes linking Chicago and St. Louis, Milwaukee and Madison. President Obama has said that he thinks a Midwestern network makes sense and would be an economic boon for the region.

Indiana has been strangely quiet. Until a week or so ago, that is, when Gov. Daniels finally said this: “I would just observe that that wouldn’t go very far if the idea is to actually build some of these,” said Daniels in the <I>Star</I>, referring to the $8 billion. “I wouldn’t want Indiana to get left holding the bag – an enormous bag – for some system that’s put in place and then began losing money, which these things tend to do.”

The trouble with what the governor’s saying is that nothing says bag-holding like his plan for building yet another highway, I-69 between Indianapolis and Evansville. The Indiana Department of Transportation’s latest cost projections for the southernmost three sections of that project have doubled – and the thing has barely begun. Estimates for the entire 142-mile stretch are currently in the $4 billion region.

That’s $4 billion to shave 20 minutes off a trip that can already be made via an existing route.
What’s more, does it really make sense to build new highways when it’s teeth-jarringly plain we can’t afford to take care of the ones we already have? Gov. Daniels has been glad to accept Obama’s stimulus money to effect highway repairs the state has been otherwise unable to pay for itself. That’s not holding the bag, rather, as the governor told Chris Wallace of Fox News, that’s “jobs, speed and lasting value.”

As to the governor’s contention that high-speed rail loses money…well, what does a highway do? Maintenance of the projected I-69 extension figures to cost, on average, $18,000 a mile. Indeed, highways not only encourage guzzling gas, they are themselves money guzzlers. A plan to deal with bottlenecks on I-69 and I-465 in Castleton will cost at least $567 million. The cost of a couple of roundabouts in Carmel could cost as much as $130 million before they’re done.

Yet the governor gripes about the potential costs of a high-speed rail corridor that could enable business people and students to travel from Indianapolis to Chicago in two hours or less, building economic and cultural bridges between Indy and one of the world’s centers of commerce and capital. He’s afraid of holding the bag for a corridor that would create a virtual shuttle service between the Purdue campus in Lafayette and IUPUI, enhancing and accelerating the state’s life sciences research and development.

Gov. Daniels was correct when he said this is an interesting time in Indiana’s history. We could be on the threshold of a transportation transformation that would revolutionize how we think about our region and our geographic place in it. The question is whether Gov. Daniels will lead us into this new era, or whether history will leave him – and the rest of us – holding the bag.

To learn more about Midwestern high-speed rail, go to www.midwesthsr.org. To contact Gov. Daniels, call: (317) 232-4567.