Rep. Moulton dishes on how to build a big tent of HSR supporters

Rep. Seth Moulton joined a recent Alliance webinar to discuss the future of high-speed rail after Republicans won the presidency and both chambers of Congress in the recent elections.

Moulton, a Democrat whose House district encompasses several communities north of Boston, said the results underscore the need to build strong, bipartisan support for fast, frequent trains. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” he said. “Republicans control everything in Washington.”

Moulton cited economics and experience as the critical tools for broadening HSR’s base of support.

On the economic front: Quality trains make sense because building train lines are less expensive than building or expanding highways—and deliver better returns on investment.

This is “the single most effective argument, in my experience,” said Moulton, who recently introduced the American High-Speed Rail Act, which calls for investing $205 billion over five years in fast trains. A train line is “cheaper than building the airports and highway expansions you would need to meet 2050 travel demand if you didn’t have high-speed rail. I have used that argument in House debates in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and it’s pretty darn effective.”

On the experience front: The HSR projects that are either planned or being built—and the fast trains already operating in Florida and the Northeast Corridor—will drive growing demand for more and better train service across America.

”The best way to get high-speed rail going and expand is to actually get people riding trains,” Moulton said. “If you look at countries that have done high-speed rail successfully across the world, a lot of them have taken the approach of building high-speed rail for shorter distances and getting people to ride them—and then they want to go a little further. The first high-speed line in France was relatively short. But once people could go from Paris to Lyon, people were like, Why can’t I go a little further?”

Moulton is especially hopeful about the high-speed line from Dallas to Houston, which Amtrak is partnering with a private company to develop. It promises to be transformative on both the economic and experience fronts, giving millions of Americans their first experience of true high-speed rail.

“I think [the line in Texas could] change the politics of high speed rail across the country,” Moulton said. “We know that it has a lot of quiet support from Republicans across the state, who know that it would be transformative for the Texas economy.

“If we can turn them into vocal supporters by having a rail line that they can champion and everyone loves to ride, that will transform the politics of high-speed rail in Washington. All of a sudden it could become a bipartisan issue..”

Moulton also noted that tailoring the message to specific audiences is key to building a broad base of support moving forward.

“In Massachusetts, we’re a state that really cares about our carbon footprint. We have sustainability goals, and high-speed rail can fit squarely right into all of that,” he said.

“But in Texas they don’t care about all of that [very] much. They do care about their taxes. And if you tell Republicans in Texas that the state is misusing your taxes because they’re wasting money on highways that are just getting congested—when you could be traveling 225 miles on a high speed train, and get there in a quarter of the time—Texans are going to wake up and say, “Yeah, let’s invest our tax dollars more wisely.”