Can Chicago Become A High Speed Rail Hub?

High-speed trains are a common sight in Japan, France, Germany, and China. Morocco, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia are getting into the high-speed rail game. While popular in concept, high-speed rail in the U.S. is limited to Amtrak Sasella between Boston and Washington. An advocacy group has been working for decades to turn Chicago into a bullet train hub. I'm WBBM News Radio's Rob Hart, and we talk to Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Alliance, this week on At Issue. Rick, I want you to paint the picture for me if the Alliance's mission is truly fulfilled. You're in the West Loop. You have breakfast at Lou Mitchell's. You walk over to Union Station. What options are available to you as a rail passenger if the High Speed Rail Alliance gets its way? Someone waved a magic wand. You get everything you want. Oh, everything I want. Yes. Downtown Detroit in two hours. Minneapolis and two and a half hours, New York by dinner, Pittsburgh, Memphis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, essentially connecting the industrial heartland of the U.S. together. Now here's a question, and you spend any amount of time on Facebook. Someone will always post a picture of the Shinkansen in Japan, the bullet train, or maybe the TGV in France, and say, why can't we have this in the United States? And there have been numerous efforts over the decades to bring that type of operation to the U.S. It hasn't happened yet, except in the Northeast. Why is that?

A hundred years now, the federal government and the states have focused on moving cars and not people. So we've spent a long time doing lots of little things that add up to communities where you can't walk, communities where you can't just go to the store from your house. You have to get in your car. And we have to fix that. But fortunately, since it was a government decision to do that, people can persuade their government to take a different direction. And then when it comes to the larger issues about mobility. The current network as it stands, trains, public transportation, the highways, the airports, especially in the Chicago area, does the current network that we have, does that meet the region's mobility needs? Oh, absolutely not. So, you know, most of our visitors to Chicago come from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin. And they're driving for the most part. Three quarters of them are driving, whether they're business or tourism. And then we force them, if they're coming from the south, is the Stevenson going to take a half hour or is it going to take an hour and a half? We don't know. Well, fortunately, there's a radio station that answers that question for you every 10 minutes. Absolutely. It's a good thing that resource exists. But you've got that from all directions, right? And then once those visitors come to visit us, we force them, you know, we actually charge market rates for parking, whereas they're used to being given parking for free by whoever they're visiting. So we really need a much better way to get around. And then we look at a train, whether it's a metro train or an Amtrak train, how many cars does that train take off the road and how many planes does that train potentially take out of the sky? Well, so a Southwest jet is 175 seats. The largest United Jet is like 360 seats. Bright Line, Florida, which is not high-speed rail, it's a great regional train that connects Orlando to Miami. They're running trains with 600 and one seats. So they are significantly bigger than planes. And then, you know, if you take one and a half people per car, I haven't done the math, but it's a lot of cars. There's always this very popular graphic that goes around. It shows a picture of a metro train on the side of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Expressway saying that this one train will take X, you know, potentially, especially during rush hour, thousands of cars off the expressway to and from downtown Chicago from some northwest suburb.

Yeah, so, you know, especially in the pre-COVID days, you would have a lot of standees on a train, so that would be 1,500 people maybe, you know, on that train. I actually did take a picture from a parking garage along the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and made an estimate of how many cars were on the road. And I think there were more people on the train than they were on the road. Now, before we talk about the present and future of high-speed rail, not only in the Midwest, but the United States, let's talk about the history of high-speed rail, because as you point out, it's really at the risk of, or at the mercy of political headwinds, and sometimes the will is there. Sometimes it pulls back due to budgetary considerations. And there, of course... other issues that occupy lawmakers' time. But they're, even going back 60 years, what is now the Acella in the Northeast Corridor, was the Metroliner, which was developed for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the train could hit 150 miles an hour in tests. And that was it. That was as fast as it can go. And that was high-speed rail in the U.S. for almost 40 years was you had to go between New York, Washington, and Boston. And there were always pilot programs. There were always demonstration projects in Chicago or in California designed to attract investors. But they never really got off the ground. And was there anything unique about that particular time that filled people, advocates like you with optimism? And then you watched it leave the station, quite literally. Well, so in 1964, Japan started running the bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka. There were three countries that said, well, we can't let them be ahead of us. France, Italy, and the U.S. So Lyndon Johnson in 1965 signed the U.S. High-Speed Ground Transportation Act, made an excellent case for why we need to do high-speed rail. And we actually delivered, they ran in regular service at 125 miles an hour. We were the first to do the next ones to run trains that fast on a regular basis. And then the French really brought it together in 1981, where they built completely new tracks, just like the Japanese did, ran trains at 170 miles an hour, and really changed the way people travel from Paris to Leone at that time and Marseille. But we've, again, we've been at this car building, highway building process, right, for a long time. And it's a hard thing to overcome, but we've really got to do it. We've got to push hard on Congress to make a big change. And then when it comes to building that high-speed train, people say, well, why can't I take a high-speed train to Milwaukee or to Madison or to Minneapolis? And you point out in France, they have to build an entirely separate track system. You can't put a high-speed train on the tracks that are used by the Metro-Milwaukee North Line because...

The curves are too tight because they're not electrified because freight trains run on them and they have a lot of wear and tear on those tracks. And is that usually where those projects go by the boards? Is the expense associated with building a brand new track system? Yes, and more importantly, it's the challenge of highway grade crossings. So we really should have a crash program to just pick off the 100 most dangerous grade crossings in the country. You know, if you go on YouTube, you can see lots of videos of freight trains hitting cars. And that should be one of our top priorities, transportation-wise, I think, in this country. But the political will to get a straight line with no gray crossings for 100 miles is one of the biggest difficulties. And we will talk about what's going on in California later in this program. But above and beyond just the logistical and engineering challenges of building long straits for this train to operate at high speeds without crossing the road. It's just the land acquisition. It is proving to be a real challenge for any high-speed rail project. Well, you know, I remember I worked in real estate a long time ago, and I was in a room where a guy had just put up a string of really nice for warehouses, a string of big warehouses along Irving Park Road south of O'Hare. just finished getting him up, and then they made an announcement that O'Hare was going to be expanded. And the look on his face, when it became clear that all of his new brand new warehouses were going to be torn down, was pretty palpable. But we did it because the city leaders thought that it was important to have six runways at O'Hare. six parallel runways. You know, I believe that we would have been better off if we had built a really good high-speed rail network that not only went to O'Hare but went downtown and you could get on a train that went to both. But when we want to do things as a country, we do them. You're listening to Add Issue on WBBM News Radio. I'm Rob Hart, and we are talking with Rick Harnish, Executive Director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Alliance. I mentioned what's going on in California, because California is actually doing it. They are building a high-speed rail network that will eventually connect San Francisco and the Los Angeles area. There's already a pretty robust rail network in place. in California. Amtrak service is practically hourly between Oakland and the San Joaquin Valley and also between San Diego and Los Angeles. Three million people rely on Amtrak every year in California. So you would think that would be a very good market for high-speed rail. But it is currently substantially behind schedule and substantially over budget. And one of the real problems is...

building that dedicated right-of-way for high-speed trains and the land acquisition involved in building and getting those tracks put in the ground has proven to be a very lengthy and expensive legal process. It has, but the key thing to doing any big project, no matter what it is, is you have an executive that's willing to make decisions and be committed to that project. And that's... largely what's missing in California is the legislature has never really appropriated enough money to get it done quickly. And so they've got enough to keep construction going. What really needs to happen is the next governor needs to stand up and say, we're going to finish this and we're going to do it quickly. And it will be a game changer for the state of California. Before we talk about a lot of the real... The real practical issues that are facing high-speed rail in that vision that you outlined about going to Wisconsin or Minnesota or Tennessee or Detroit in a matter of hours, maybe one or two hours as opposed to five or six on Amtrak right now or in a car. Having cities closer and via hourly train service, how does that... change the game for people who live in Chicago. If you can hop at a train and you're in Detroit two hours from now. And it's not just the time of being just two hours away. It's also high-speed trains are a lot more flexible. They run a lot more frequently. They have a lot more seats. And it doesn't take the time to get to the airport and get through the airport and all of that. So what that leads to is flexibility. And what that means in a business case is, say you come into the office at 8 o'clock and your most important client is mad. Or there's an opportunity. Let's be positive. There's a really opportune opportunity. You can confidently say, I'll see you for lunch. You absolutely cannot do that for Detroit or Cincinnati, especially Cincinnati today. because it'll take you five or six hours to drive. You probably can't get an airplane ticket. The planes don't fly frequently enough to get you there. But with a high-speed train, you can go for lunch. There's an extreme example I have of this where I was in Rome for a business meeting. And the week before, I just happened to see a movie about why pizzas are so much better in Naples than anywhere else in the world. And the business meeting ended a little bit early, so I walked down to Rome Terminize Station. I was on a high with no ticket, but I bought a ticket. I was on a train within 15 minutes. Less than an hour later, I was in Naples, walked to one of the restaurants in the movie, got a pizza, walked back to the train when I was back in time to get in bed and had a reasonable hour in Rome. It's that kind of flexibility that trains have that you just can't do with driving or flying. How would that also change migration patterns inside the Midwest? Because frequent metro service, all of a sudden, you know, Crystal Lake is attainable for someone who works in downtown Chicago because the train can get you there in an hour. Or if you live past Aurora, you can get downtown in 45 minutes. If all of a sudden Minnesota is two hours away by train.

You could potentially live in a much cheaper area in the Midwest and work in downtown Chicago. So with high speed rail, champagne would be 45 minutes to an hour away. Springfield would be in the neighborhood of 90 minutes to two hours. Decatur's there in the middle. And then East St. Louis is two hours. So each of those areas, champagne's better off than the others, but each of those areas had a lot of vacant land walking distance from the train station. It'll completely change the character of those cities. And more importantly, for the future of the state, I believe that if we had really good trains in this state, the headquarters for Caterpillar would still be in Peoria and the headquarters for ADM would still be in Decatur. And the state as a whole would be much healthier financially. Let's talk about some of the political advocacy that the alliance has been doing over the last couple of years. How are you getting in the ears of local politicians and politicians in Springfield? What kind of legislative agenda is your organization pushing? Well, the top priority is to get engineering started. So not feasibility studies, not a discussion. I think it's pretty obvious we need to get a great train to Champagne. You've got so much knowledge stuff happening in Champaign. Google's got an outpost there, et cetera. They're in charge of Quantum. Quantum's on the south side of Chicago. And then you've got Hyde Park with the University of Chicago. So those definitely need to be connected with a train every hour. And that would really change the entire way the state looks at itself and the way other people look at the state. So we should just get engineering going. We know what the basic options are for where to put the tracks. Pick the three top ones that it makes looks like it makes sense. Do 30% design work and decide which one's the best and then go find money to build it. How about on the national level? Obviously with the change in administrations, you went from Amtrak passenger number one leaving office in January of 2025. Now you have the Trump administration in. How, what's the high-speed rail advocacy on the national level? Well, we're really excited because Representative Seth Moulton from the suburbs of Boston has been pushing a bill that would create really important changes in policy for getting high-speed rail built and sets a bar for spending that would actually get a number of projects done across the country. So that's a real opportunity to have a different conversation. Right now, the current administration wants to go back to the days where, you know, it was made very clear by most governments in this country that if you couldn't drive, you weren't a welcome part of this society. I mean, I think the current administration would like to go back to that.

But we really need to push on this opportunity to talk about high-speed rail through Maltonsville. And then when it comes to strategic opportunities, there is currently a merger in the railroad space between Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific. It would create a mega freight railroad that would connect the Atlantic to the Pacific. There's a reason why the big boy is on the road on the Norfolk Southern in the eastern U.S. right now. A giant merger like that and chances are that would lead to other combinations between major freight railroads would probably force the divestitures of a number of rail lines for competitive reasons. Has there been any talk in the high-speed rail community about jumping in and getting state governments or even Amtrak? to pick up lines that could be spun as a result of that mega merger. So you have the tracks and you're not worrying about freight trains anymore? Well, if I can distract you for a minute and talk about this merger. So the railroads, again, for about 100 years, you have to remember, railroads are privately owned. Highways are owned by a public entity and highly subsidized. About 50% of the construction cost is subsidized. And then forget the operation cost, the expressway. And then airports are publicly owned by governments. So O'Hare is owned by the city of Chicago. And the reason you do that is because private companies don't want to invest in long-term infrastructure. and railroads are long-term infrastructure. For decades, the railroads have not invested enough money to maintain the existing level of service. And even now, they are still pushing freight that should be moving by train onto trucks because they don't want to invest in the infrastructure in order to run the kind of service we need, both freight and passenger. And so really what this merger is about, is making it taking another step where they take money out of the system and they put it in the shareholders' hands because the shareholders think they're better off investing in self-driving cars or whatever. So that's a real serious problem that we have in this country. Now, given that, there is the possibility that they'll say, well, we don't really need this line anymore. One of them should be Chicago to Milwaukee. I'm on the UPU North Line, which goes along the lake. The states of Illinois and Wisconsin should insist on being able to buy that as part of the merger deal. And then the other is Chicago to Madison. There's a straight line through Janesville, essentially, gets you Chicago to Madison in less than two hours without having to run high speed. So those are two opportunities that the state should seize. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources in place in the state to do that.

You're listening to Add Issue on WBBM News Radio. I'm Rob Hart. We are talking with Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Alliance. We don't necessarily have true high speed rail in the Midwest, but we have a couple of lines that come close, and one of which is Chicago to St. Louis, which once you get past Joliette, the train runs at 110. And... I took that last year, and I thought that was transformative compared to the way it used to be. Because you can now get down to St. Louis in under five hours, and that is a bit of a psychological barrier. So is there an argument to be made that just shy of bringing the TGV to America or the bullet train or ice what they have in Germany that may be just getting the existing service? that we have out of Chicago, up to 110, that could potentially drive a lot more interest in rail compared to what we have? The challenge there is, the CN, or the Canadian National, which owns the tracks from Chicago to Juliet. And then Union Pacific, there's that name again, from Juliette to East St. Louis. They're not really interested in investing in that infrastructure. And so that project that you talked about was really money incredibly well spent. So, and we have to be clear, about a third of it was actually highway money. Every new town along the route got new roads in order to make the highway crossing safer, but it was highway money. And before that, if the rain, the train had to slow down to 10 miles an hour because the signaling system got shorted out by the rate. So we're much better off for that. But that was really intended to be a demonstration project. And what would need to happen to make that line work well is to put a second track in the entire way. and get rid of some slow spots. So you're on that trip, you pulled out of Juliet, you got up to 110 miles an hour, and then you slowed down to go around a couple of curves in Wilmington, get up to 110 miles an hour, you slow down to cross the Norfolk Southern at Dwight. There's a lot of that that needs to be fixed. So again, it should happen because there's Dwight, there's Pontiac, there's Lincoln. All of those places would not be served by high-speed rail and they need much better, much more frequent service. So we need to do that. We also need to build high-speed rail. One of the big changes in transit governance in Illinois, of course, is the end of the RTA, long-lived the RTA, replaced with the Northern Illinois Transportation Authority, which theoretically takes public transportation out of the five-county service area, and you could potentially look at... rail service going to the Quad Cities, going to Galena once again, going down to Peoria for the first time since I think 1980. And are there opportunities there for not maybe true high-speed rail, but regular, convenient, and fast rail service to other cities in Illinois? So essentially what we believe is about 20% of the big network.

should be new tracks where you're going really fast and you put that in strategic places where it changes a lot of trips not just the main points and then about 80% of the network should be by rebuilding existing railroads in order to average at least 66 miles an hour And at 66 here, if you're going down down to downtown, it's more convenient than driving. And then the next piece is it really needs to be every hour or in some cases every two hours. And that's where it'll become interesting. And so working with Metra, now that the governor has appointees on the Metro board. working with Metro to get to Peoria to the Quad Cities, extending the line from Kenosha to Milwaukee, extending from Harvard to Madison. and having Metro go all the way to Champaign are really things that the governor needs to work on. And then lastly, I'm going to put on my naysayer hat, the voice of the naysayer, and that is this vision that you outline about quick and frequent service to Detroit or Memphis or elsewhere in the Midwest, they will say, we already have that. It's called Southwest Airlines. I can go to Midway Airport and do all of that and more. And what's your response to that criticism? You can't. So you can't get by air from the main part of Chicago to the main to part of Chicago to Detroit in two hours. You just can't do it. If you've got a ticket in advance, maybe it's affordable to do it once in a while, but you can't do it every hour. And you certainly can't take Southwest to Kalamazoo or Battle Creek or Grand Rapids. This is about much more than the few people who want to fly. This is about taking 20% of the people who are driving and giving them the chance to do something that's safer, more productive, less expensive. and more enjoyable. And then finally, I said lastly before, but now finally, we talked about some of the legislative issues that are being worked on at a federal level to maybe remove some of the hurdles to make these projects a little more realistic and cost effective. What are the top two on your mind that need to be addressed? So, you know, the top one in the state of Illinois is getting true engineering work going and getting that process accelerated. and then working out how we're going to use Metra to become a much bigger player and passenger trains in general. And then when it comes to funding between now and our bullet train future, some of that transportation money, using it just for more equipment to replace some of the aging Metra and Amtrak coaches and also.

the possibility to add more trains. Because right now, for example, the borealis, which goes up to the Twin Cities, it's one round trip back and forth. It seems to be popular. It attracts 200,000 passengers a year. Could you imagine what would happen with the second one? Yeah. So that actually is... That is the most urgent issue actually is we need to place a big order for trains. You know, I was born in 64. I wrote a metric coach yesterday that was built in 63. That's not acceptable. Now that's going to be replaced in the next several years, but by the time the cars from the 60s are replaced... the cars from the 70s are going to be that old. So we need to really accelerate that. Amtrak services sold out frequently because there just aren't enough coaches. So let's get the state of Illinois to buy a big order. Rick Harnish, Executive Director, the Midwest High Speed Rail Alliance. Thank you for joining us this week on At Issue. If you want to hear the program again, you can do so at wbvm newsradio.com, the Odyssey app and the IHeartRadio app. Join us next week for another edition of At Issue. Until then, I'm Rob Hart. News Radio 105.9 WBBM.