Hard to believe, but Texas Governor (and GOP Presidential contender) Rick Perry was once a big proponent of high-speed rail:
Rick Perry launched his Texas gubernatorial campaign in 2002 with an idea that he hoped would become his legacy: a 4,000-mile-long, 21st century transit network on which motorists would drive 90 mph on toll roads 10 lanes wide, high-speed trains would hum alongside, and there would be room for electric power lines, broadband fiber and pipes to pump oil, natural gas and water to a rapidly growing state.
Perry called it the Trans-Texas Corridor, and advertised his blueprint as “bold” and “visionary” — a “plan as big as Texas and as ambitious as our people.”
And it would all be done without raising taxes, thanks to partnerships with the private sector. The entire venture, priced at more than $200 billion in today’s dollars, would leave the old interstate highways in the dust and provide, in Perry’s view, a model for the nation.
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It’s not all that surprising. At the time Perry proposed the Trans-Texas Corridor, it was just about development for the sake of development. HSR was just one of several components – it’s not like today, when it’s identified with liberals so that Republicans other than Mica have a political not-invented-here aversion to it.
The HSR component was certainly not done intelligently. The plan was to have it run exactly in the freeway corridor, with trains circling the three triangle city regions in beltways rather than going into them. In other words, no thought was given to how trains normally work; it was just about building the most iconic infrastructure known.