Word: training
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...peninsula state's population has exploded in recent years - Florida is set to pass New York as the nation's third largest state - its road and air corridors have become more gridlocked and eco-unfriendly. Which is why Floridians voted in 2000 to build a high-speed bullet-train service between Miami, Tampa and Orlando. By 2004, however, then-governor Jeb Bush, who had insisted the estimated $6 billion cost would in reality top $20 billion, had persuaded Florida voters to drop the idea...
...bullet-train idea is back, as it is throughout the rest of the country, thanks to $13 billion for high-speed rail (HSR) that was tucked into President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package. The application process for bullet-train bucks ($8 billion this year and $1 billion in each of the next five years) began this week. States like Florida are vying for big chunks of it - not only as free funding for a traffic decongestant they thought they couldn't afford, but also as a high-tech pump primer for the kind of higher-wage jobs that...
...Obama Administration has identified 10 major regional corridors for HSR funding: three in the heavily populated Northeast (where the quasi-high-speed Acela train is already in use), then the Southeast coast, Florida, the upper Gulf Coast, the Midwest (dubbed the Chicago Hub), Texas (South Central), the Pacific Northwest and California. Of those, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has pointed to California and Florida as being "way ahead of the curve" in terms of preparing for HSR. Florida, for example, already did most of the spade work, including land acquisition and environmental-impact and ridership studies before Bush quashed...
...directed his transportation officials to apply for the funds, he hasn't exactly played the ebullient cheerleader he's famous for being on issues like alternative energy. That's largely because he knows a chorus of voices in Florida and the rest of the nation still fears that bullet trains, despite the federal largesse, will turn out to be a white elephant whose costs have been lavishly underestimated by the Obama Administration. Even the Orlando Sentinel, which covers a city that would absorb a large share of the $1.5 billion Florida will seek to help fund a $2.5 billion Orlando...
...many opponents see it as financial quicksand, certain the Orlando-Tampa high-speed line will end up costing much more than $2.5 billion. Still, free billions from Washington during a crippling recession are hard to pass up. Florida's bullet, as a result, may well be a train that's already left the station...