A group of Pacific Northwest states and cities are hoping a federal planning grant will jumpstart a longtime dream of high speed rail connecting the Cascadia megaregion.
"We're excited about it," said Roger Millar, Washington State's secretary of transportation and current president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
"We are in the process right now of preparing," a federal grant application, Millar said. "We're working with our colleagues in Oregon and colleagues in British Columbia, both on the public side and the private side. We're working with the business community in British Columbia, the business community here in Washington and the business community in Oregon, and the local governments. We're all working together on this; we're putting in a planning grant to the Federal Railroad Administration and our hope is that we can advance the project."
The Cascadia High Speed Rail Project is one of a handful of fledgling bullet train proposals around the country, including
First proposed in 2016 by a group that included Microsoft, the Cascadia HSR project would traverse the roughly 300-mile area spanning Portland to Seattle to Vancouver, British Columbia, what is called the Cascadia megaregion. Supporters say it could spark $355 billion of economic activity within the region.
The hoped-for federal grant is part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which featured a "big, big bump" in money for the FRA, Millar said.
The Washington Legislature in 2022 set aside $150 million that could be used as a local match for federal funds, Millar said. Lawmakers also appropriated $4 million to begin planning the bullet train, the bulk of which would run through Washington.
A 2017-2018 feasibility estimated a price tag of $24 billion to $42 billion, but even in that wide range, the costs should be "taken with a grain of salt," Greg Spitz, senior director at the Resource Systems Group, told Washington lawmakers in a Joint Transportation Committee during a Dec. 15 hearing on the project.
The state hired RSG to conduct an independent review of the project, which is due by June 2023.
"Costs are vague right now," Spitz told the committee. "We're going to do a more detailed investigation on them, but I don't know if we can a lot more until we get a more detailed concept."
Millar has previously said that the project would allow the state to avoid widening I-5, which carries its own price tag of $108 billion.
California, which is in the building phase, has some very precise numbers, Spitz said. "They know exactly how much it costs to buy that land, pour the concrete," he said. "It's real, and it's well-advanced, so as [Cascadia HSR] advances, these costs will be better understood."
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, now in his third term, is a strong supporter, saying in the past that a bullet train could transform the Pacific Northwest and "provide us with a strong competitive advantage in the future."
