The country has more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail, the vast

majority of which was built in the last decade.

Japan's bullet trains can reach speeds of almost 200 miles per hour.

And date back to the 1960s.

They've become a staple for domestic travel and have moved more than 9

billion people without a single passenger casualty.

France began service of the high-speed TGV train in 1981 and the rest of

Europe quickly followed.

And high-speed rail is quickly expanding all over the world in places like

India, Saudi Arabia, Russia Iran and Morocco.

And then there's the U.S.

The U.S.

used to be one of the world's global leaders in rail but after World War

II there was a massive shift.

If you look at the United States prior to 1945, we had a very extensive

rail system everywhere.

It all was working great except a number of companies in the auto and oil

industries decided that for them to have a prosperous future they really

needed to basically help phase out all the rail and get us all into cars.

The inflexible rails permanently embedded in cobblestones were paved over

to provide smooth, comfortable transportation via diesel motor coach.

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil and a few other companies that

got together and they were able to buy up all the nation's streetcar

systems and then quickly start phasing out service and literally

dismantling all the systems over about a 10-year span.

In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill to create the National Interstate System.

It allocated about $25 billion dollars to build 41,000 miles of highways.

The federal government paid for 90% of that, the states covered the final

10 and rail fell by the wayside.

Can't you see that this highway means a whole new way of life for the

children? And a way of life that we have a chance to help plan and, and to build.

We dedicated a huge amount of dollars to building automobile infrastructure

in the middle of the 20th century and we're still kind of attached to that

model of development.

We went from a rail-served country to a auto-dependent nation by the 1960s.

We've become a car culture and it's hard to break out of that cycle.

Not to mention the fact that in our political system we have very powerful

oil lobbies, car manufacturing lobbies, aviation lobbies, all the entities

that the high-speed rail would have to compete with.

This is the American dream of freedom on wheels.

We average some 850 cars per thousand inhabitants in the U.S.,

in China it's only 250.

And we've never gone back.

But according to some this country's transportation ecosystem is reaching

a tipping point.

When you look at what's happening with the corridor development, again

states across the U.S.

who are recognizing they are running out of space to expand their highways

or interstates.

There are limits at airports, there is aviation congestion, so what are

the options?

A better rail system is one and could come with significant benefits.

It's largely an environmental good to switch from air traffic and car

traffic to electrified high-speed rail.

That's a much lower emission way of traveling.

When the high-speed rail between Madrid and Barcelona in Spain came into

operation, I mean air travel just plummeted between those cities and

everyone switched over to high-speed rail which was very convenient.

People were happier.

They weren't forced to switch, they did it because it was a nicer option

to take high-speed rail.

There's a sort of a rule of thumb for trips that are under three or four

hours in trip length from city to city, those usually end up with about 80

or 90 percent of the travel market from aviation.

Where rail exists and it's convenient and high-speed, it's very popular.

America I think is waking up to this idea that rail is a good investment

for transportation infrastructure.

One survey showed 63% of Americans would use high-speed rail if it was

available to them.

Younger people want it even more.

Right now the main passenger rail option in the U.S.

is Amtrak.

It's operated as a for-profit company but the federal government is its

majority stakeholder.

Train systems reaching top speeds of over 110 to 150 miles per hour are

generally considered high-speed and only one of Amtrak's lines could be

considered as such.

That's its Acela line in the Northeast Corridor running between D.C.,

New York and Boston.

One of the challenges we face is that the Northeast Corridor has a lot of

curvature, a lot of geometry.

We really operate Acela Express on an alignment that in some places was

designed back in the nineteen hundreds and so it really was never designed

for high-speed rail.

And while the Acela line can reach up to 150 miles per hour, it only does

so for 34 miles of its 457 mile span.

Its average speed between New York and Boston is about 65 miles per hour,

which is in stark contrast to China's dedicated high-speed rail system

which regularly travels at over 200 miles per hour.

But some people are trying to fix that.

In 2008 California voted yes on high-speed rail.

Now, a decade later, construction is underway in the Central Valley of the

state. And right now it is the only truly high-speed rail system under

construction in the U.S.

Ultimately high-speed rail is a 520 mile project that links San Francisco

to Los Angeles and Anaheim, that's phase one.

And it's a project that's being built in building blocks.

So the one behind me is the largest building block that we're starting

with, this 119 mile segment.

This segment will run from Bakersfield to Merced.

Eventually the plan is to build a line from San Francisco to Anaheim, just

south of L.A.

But as it stands the state is almost $50 billion short of what it needs to

actually do that.

The current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take

too long.

There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency.

We do have the capacity to complete a high-speed rail link between Merced

and Bakersfield.

After Gavin Newsom made that speech President Trump threatened to pull

federal funding for the project.

We will continue to seek other funding.

We hope the federal government will resume funding the, contributing new

funds to the project.

I think in the future, as the federal government has funded major

construction of infrastructure over time they'll again direct money to

high-speed rail because in fact it's not just California but other states

are also interested in high-speed rail systems.

To complete the entire line as planned, the official estimate is now over

$77 billion and it's unclear where the money will come from.

So why is it so expensive?

Part of the problem in California, the big price tag is getting through the

Tehachapi, very expensive tunneling, or over the Pacheco Pass to get into

San Jose from the Central Valley.

You know, Eastern China, the flatlands of Japan where they've built the

Shinkansen, all of those are settings where they have, didn't incur the

very high expense of boring and tunneling that we face so the costs are

different.

And a lot of the money is spent before construction can even begin.

Just in this little segment here alone we're dealing with the private

property owner, we're dealing with a rail company, we're dealing with the

state agency and so just the whole coordination.

Then we're dealing with a utility company, just in this very small

section; we had to relocate two miles of freeway and that was roughly $150

million per mile.

So there's a lot of moving pieces to, you know, anywhere we start

constructing.

China is the place that many folks compare.

They have like 29,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and 20 years ago they

had none.

So how have they been able to do it so quickly?

And part of it is that the state owns the land, they don't have private

property rights like we have in the U.S.

You don't have the regulations we have in terms of labor laws and

environmental regulations that add to cost.

It also delays the projects.

For some reason and I've never really quite seen an adequate explanation as

to why costs to build transit or many big infrastructure projects are just

dramatically higher than in other parts of the world, including in other

advanced countries.

But the bottom line is we're really bad at just building things cheaply

and quickly in the U.S.

in general.

So it's not just rail infrastructure that is expensive, all transportation

infrastructure is.

Just the physical investment in the freeway usually will be 5 to 8 to 10

million per mile but if you add seismic issues and land acquisition and

utilities and environmental mitigation and remediation of soils and

factors like that it can become as high as 100 or 200 million a mile.

The numbers for high-speed rail can vary anywhere from 20 to 80 million

per mile.

The big reason why America is behind on high-speed rail is primarily money.

We don't commit the dollars needed to build these systems, it's really as

simple as that.

And it's largely a political issue.

We don't have political leaders who really want to dedicate the dollars

needed.

There's a lot of forces in America that really don't want to see rail

become our major mode of transportation especially because it will affect

passenger numbers on airplanes, it'll affect the use of autos.

So you have the politics, the message shaping and then the straight

advertising and all three of those coordinate and work together to keep

America kind of focused on cars and not focused on rail.

Some of the earliest support for rail came from the Nixon administration.

Some of the original capital subsidies and operating subsidies for urban

transit came from the Republican party, so I think it's only more recently

that maybe this has shifted that more liberal leaning folks who care about

climate and a whole host of urban issues have really argued for investing

very heavily in rail.

If you had Democratic leadership on the Senate and a different president or

potentially some leverage for a president to sign a new budget bill with

some dollars for high-speed rail, that could override those objections

from Republicans in Congress.

But I think it's mostly ideological.

They're big on highways.

They're big on things like toll roads.

They just, they don't want the government spending dollars on this kind of

project and they see it as something those socialist European countries do

but not something that should be done in, you know, car-loving America.

In my judgment, it would take a very strong federal commitment, almost sort

of a post-Second World War interstate highway kind of large scale national

commitment.

This is why some high-speed rail projects are trying to avoid public

funding altogether.

One company, Texas Central, plans to build a bullet train from Houston to

Dallas without using a dime of taxpayer money.

We're taking what is laborious, unreliable four-hour drive if you're lucky

and turning that into a reliable, safe 90 minutes.

And when you look at that as a business plan being driven by data, this is

the right place to build the first high-speed train in the United States.

The Texas project is backed by investors motivated to make a profit and

will use proven Japanese rail technology.

Texas Central's goal is to complete the project by 2025.

Another private company is even further along with its rail system, in

Florida. It's expanding its higher-speed train from Miami to Orlando.

Orlando's the most heavily visited City the United States.

Miami is the most heavily visit international city in the United States.

It's too far to drive, it's too short to fly, we had the rail link and

that was really the genesis of the project.

Wes Edens has invested heavily in Florida's rail project which used to be

called Brightline.

Brightline recently rebranded to Virgin Trains as the company partnered

with Richard Branson's Virgin Group.

The team at Brightline, which is now called Virgin Trains, has proven that

it can work.

The people actually want to get out of their cars and they'd love to be on trains.

In order to reach profitability, the company sacrificed speed to save money.

If you want to really go high-speed you have to grade separate.