High-speed-rail plan surfaces

Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Bob Briggs, a former state lawmaker and member of the Regional Transportation District board, is also chief conductor for Ranger Xpress.

It's a proposal to develop 700 miles of modern track that would thread together the highly populated Front Range and the busy Interstate 70 mountain corridor between Denver and Grand Junction.

An additional 300 miles past the northern and southern borders of the state would allow passengers to continue as far north as Casper and south of Albuquerque thanks to concurrent efforts in those states.

"It's critical to put this together right now," said Briggs, citing continued population growth that will further clog highways.

Briggs' Rocky Mountain Rail Authority is seeking local and federal money for a feasibility study that would keep the proposal on track for a public vote on financing in less than two years. Construction would be simultaneous with the build-out of metro Denver's FasTracks rail system.

Ranger Xpress would feed passengers into the FasTracks network and pass through the metro area.

The cost? Unknown at this point. One rough estimate puts it at $9 billion.

The way to pay for it?

In part, that will be up to the voters, who may be asked as early as 2008 to approve a tax, perhaps a statewide sales tax increase.

"We don't have enough answers yet to start putting a cost to it," Briggs said.

But it starts with getting the federal government to designate the Front Range as a high-speed rail corridor.

There are 11 such corridors and 10 already have been named - leaving one more.

The designated corridors are eligible for federal assistance. Those that have been named generally connect highly populated areas, but not all of them do.

The Northern New England corridor, for instance, has two spurs running north out of Boston, one to Auburn, Maine, and the other to Montreal. The Empire corridor connects New York City with Albany and Buffalo. The South Central Corridor connects San Antonio, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Little Rock.

The Northwest Corridor runs from Eugene, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C., through Portland and Seattle. In California, a split corridor connects the major urban areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento.

Briggs anticipates an attempt to link the corridors to each other to create a national high-speed rail system. If that happens, there's a big hole right in the center of the country where there is no corridor. That's where the Ranger Xpress proposal would come in.

"I'm pretty convinced in my mind it will be a seamless operation," Briggs said. "It makes sense to have us as the 11th rail corridor because it helps close the chasm in the center of the U.S."