KTRH interviews David Crossley on high-speed rail

The “Texas T-Bone”

Wendy Natt, Jan 30, 09.

David Crossley of Houston Tomorrow was recently interviewed by KTRH radio about the idea of a high-speed rail system for the Texas Triangle region along a proposed set of corridors that together are commonly known as the “Texas T-Bone.”

The Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corp., a nonprofit consortium of elected officials, city and county agencies, and businesses - including two airlines - are behind the well-publicized push to build high-speed rail between the cities of Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston by 2020, according to a recent story in the Houston Chronicle. Supporters of the current plan say that the project will work as a public-private partnership between local governments and agencies as well as regional business interests.

KTRH interviewers J.P. Pritchard and Lana Hughes asked David about the new plan, beginning with the question of whether a high-speed rail connection between Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio is a practical idea.

Listen to an mp3 segment of the interview (640.9KB).

Crossley: “I think that it’s not only practical, I think it’s required, that as we decide that we’re going to have to find ways to move things and people around other than airplanes, which are very expensive to operate for short hops, this idea starts to make a lot of sense.”

Hughes: “How much would something like this cost, David?”

Crossley: “Well, we’re seeing numbers like $12 and $18 billion, but with any kind of a big project like this, you know, it’s all just a lot of guessing in the beginning, because there’s so much right-of-way expense, and so forth. If you imagine, for instance, that the expansion of the Katy Freeway came in at $900 million as the projection, and ultimately cost nearly $3 billion, you know, you can imagine, it could be a lot more.”

Pritchard: “Well, you think about that super-[highway]corridor that’s basically been shot down. The governor’s office has, in essence, cancelled it because of opposition, in some parts from landowners who don’t want their land taken away or divided. Aren’t you going to run into the same thing with this?”

Crossley: “Well, it could be, although we do have some right-of-way already, and, you know, if you go to look at the maps and you spend any time with this you’ll see that it’s all sort of vague about where, exactly, it goes. You know, it could be at the edge of a freeway. It could be out across farmer’s land, and we just don’t know. We don’t even really know where the stations are at this point, although that’s becoming somewhat clearer. But, you know, the important thing here, there are two critical things to think about here: one is that this region which we call the Texas Triangle, a megaregion that has Dallas-Ft Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio - 70 percent of all Texans live in it. So, by, say, 2040 or so, that’s going to be, that’s almost 30 million people. So this gets to be a transit system for huge numbers of people. The business that we can achieve in the Texas Triangle if we can find ways to get connected, not just for people, but for freight, too, that are efficient, then – [as the] world changes, or the economy changes and globalization become more problematic - the Texas Triangle is going to emerge as a huge economic powerhouse.”