Can High-Speed Rail Finally Take Off In America?

That's Rick Harnish, executive director of the High-Speed Rail Alliance.

Right now, the only train line in America that qualifies as high-speed rail is Amtrak's Acela that runs between Washington, D.C. and Boston.

The Acela train can reach a top speed of 160 miles per hour, but only along about 50 miles of track.

That's nothing when compared to many high-speed trains abroad, which can reach up to 220 miles per hour and run for a much longer distance.

Part of why the U.S. lacks in this category dates back to the mid-1900s.

In the years after World War II, the U.S. invested heavily in highways as car ownership surged and the economy grew.

Since then, much of our transportation funding has been funneled primarily into cars and roads.

So it's not even like we're falling behind.

It's like we're not even acknowledging that this is important to do at all.

The whole reason is because we focused 100% of our efforts and all of our trillions of dollars of transportation money over the last 75 years all on just roads and aviation.

And basically just starve the heck out of Amtrak until it's literally like we're still operating some of the same falling apart trains from 75 years ago.

I read a study recently.

It said something like since this is even all the way back.

This is just from like the since the 70s.

We've spent something like two trillion dollars on highways.

We've spent almost a trillion dollars on aviation, and we've spent not even like

$4 billion on high-speed rail.

That's Andy Kunz, founder and president of the U.S.

High-Speed Rail Association.

Kuhns says that building a high-speed rail network here can be even more expensive than overseas, with estimates ranging from $100 to $400 million per mile of track.

because much of the existing rail track would need to be upgraded or completely rebuilt.