Today, there are no high-speed lines in the United States according to the International Union of Railways’ standards, but one higher-speed rail example in the Northeast corridor. Several resounding failures occurred in succession in the 1980s and 1990s in Texas, in Florida and in Ohio. In 2021, the only public project under construction lies in California while some various private projects are under development (Florida, Texas, LA-Las Vegas corridor). This analysis develops a reflection on the high-speed rail model in the US as well as on the political and territorial lessons to be learned of this federal initiative.
This research concerns territorial embeddedness and the territorialization of rail policies in a context where the individual states and local actors develop their own practices and their own forms of public action based on political and economic considerations that have little to do with the federal level.
One of our hypothesis concerns the emergence of a new policy favoring high-speed rail. The analysis supports the idea that a different high-speed rail development strategy is emerging in the United States. However, an analysis of these high-speed corridor projects shows that speed is not the dominant paradigm in the planning documents and has in fact been challenged in the scientific literature for many years. Three findings emerge from this analysis:
- the hybridization of the technical solutions for introducing high-speed intercity rail services – with the de facto coexistence of high-speed corridors, mixed higher-speed corridors (public and private infrastructure sharing), and private corridors on which the national operator Amtrak is absent;
- a high degree of selectivity in the construction of high-speed lines on a very small number of megaregional corridors with the right geographic and urban conditions;
- the dominant high-speed rail strategies in the US are regionalized, based on a bottom-up approach that reflects local specificities.
Mots clés : High-speed rail|United States|rail planning |financing |stakeholders
A102694MS