“Amtrak Joe” Biden, in Philly, Announces New Plan for High-Speed Rail
The Obama administration is taking its infrastructure push on the road. First stop: Philadelphia, to announce a $53 billion plan to invest in high-speed rail.

"Amtrak Joe" announced the administration's plan for investing in high-speed rail this morning. Photo: Brendan Polmer/CNN
To Vice President Joe Biden, high-speed rail isn’t just another administration initiative. He’s Mr. Amtrak. He gets it. Biden says he’s made 7,900 round trips between Wilmington and Washington on Amtrak. If each of those trips had been reduced by 10 minutes, he says, he would have had 55 more days to spend with his family or working.
So the vice president was a fitting ambassador to travel to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to announce a six-year plan to build a national high-speed rail network that will, the administration says, reach 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. The plan he outlined today would devote $8 billion to rail development next year.
“In the next 40 years, the United States is expected to increase in population by 100 million people,” Biden said. “Seventy percent of all people in America now live within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. You know how congested we are now. What happens with 100 million more, a significant portion of them along our coasts?”
Each day, he said, six times more people take a train than an airplane to get between Washington and Philadelphia. And more than twice as many people take the train between New York and Washington than fly. “How many more slots can the Philadelphia airport open?” Biden asked. “Airways can only take so much traffic in the lanes.”
“If you shut down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor,” Biden said, “you’d have to add seven new lanes to I-95 to accommodate the traffic.” He then went on to cite the cost-benefit analysis of building rail instead of road. The construction cost for an average linear mile of one lane through the city of Philadelphia ranges from $40-50 million. And one new runway, like the one Atlanta just built in its Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, costs $1.3 billion.
“When you talk about the investments we’re making in rail, they pale in comparison to investment you’d have to make in runways or highways,” Biden said. “And that’s before you factor in the environmental benefit of taking cars off the road.”


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Barack Obama's standing as an
