President Joe Biden is reportedly seeking to revive a project that would construct a high-speed railway from Houston to Dallas in Texas utilizing Japanese bullet trains.
According to a Reuters report on Tuesday, citing unnamed administration sources, the White House is looking to make an announcement on the project following talks between Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington, D.C., this week.
The Japanese government and the White House declined to comment on the report, though the project has seen renewed support from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who told KXAS in Fort Worth on Sunday: “We believe in this.”
It’s not surprising that the first city pair would be a commonly traveled route with cheap flat land in between. Once that’s demonstrated to work, they can start trying it for cities where the need to purchase rights for the route will be more expensive, and on terrain where long straight segments are more challenging to construct.
This source says average, about 24,000 people drive between the two cities any given day, and there are about 30 commercial flights per day between the cities. That sounds like a decent amount of potential demand.
But how walkable are Dallas and Houston? I think the success of this is predicated on that, because if people can’t get around without a car, they’ll take one with them.
Still though, pretty cool. Sucks it’ll be in Texas but progress is progress.
Texas is barely walkable from the back of the giant parking lot into the store.
Depends on where you are, but with that 30 flight number there’s definitely plenty of people that aren’t bringing their cars with them.
Dallas proper has some light rail around downtown with a couple lines that travel outward, and even a train that goes from Downtown Dallas to downtown Fort Worth. It’s still difficult to get to a lot of places outside downtown, the American Airlines Center, and the State Fair ground though.
Houston I think has some buses, but it would also be difficult to get too far from downtown.
Houston sometimes has sidewalks. Sometimes.
Houston has some light rail also.
Well fortunately we have Uber, so people can take Ubers around. It’s less energy efficient than each person having their own car, but it’s more parking efficient which leads to economic viability.
Are those flights because of hub relationships? Where it will still be somehow cheaper to fly with a hop than to fly direct out of the hub?
I once lived 1hr from an airport and 2hrs from a hub. It was always cheaper to drive to the closest airport and fly to the hub. Absolutely annoying.
Yes, a big chunk of the flight demand probably comes from the fact that each is a hub for a major airline (American Airlines has its big hub in DFW, and United has one of its major hubs in IAH).
Still there are a lot of flights between the two cities for passengers who are starting and stopping their journeys there.