Illustration by Danny Elchert
Rich “Bullet Train” Pisani may have been a visionary after all.
Pisani is the local businessman who—along with fellow St. Louisans Cicardi Bruce and Mark Kasen—had a lofty idea nearly two decades ago for putting their hometown on the world map.
Their dream in 1990: On the centennial anniversary of the famed 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis would host another such fair, along with the Summer Olympics. St. Louis would share the event with Kansas City, with the centerpiece being the linkage of the two cities by a high-speed bullet train that would reduce travel time between them to barely more than an hour.
Pisani was truly coming out of nowhere: The first Post-Dispatch story on him was headlined “Forward-Looking Local Man Trains His Energies on a Fair-Sized Olympic Vision.” Anonymous guys get strange titles in the media.
Still, the “forward-looking local man” had a king for a role model.
That was King Juan Carlos of Spain, whose country was in the process of pulling off such a feat to link key cities for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Indeed, Pisani and company decided to put together a VHS tape showing off the Spanish high-speed rail innovation, and Pisani took off around the state to promote it.
Pisani says it was decided he would run for Missouri lieutenant governor for the sole purpose of publicizing the grand plans. He even went to the length of legally changing his middle name to “Bullet Train” so that a resistant Secretary of State Roy Blunt would have to allow the words to appear on the ballot as part of his name.
That much of the plan worked for Rich “Bullet Train” Pisani.
For nearly two years, Pisani visited every Missouri county to beat his drum to audiences, which—he says today—were excited about the bullet-train idea once they got over the initial impression that he was out of his mind. “I’m not Buck Rogers,” Pisani would say over and over, pointing out that his nutty vision was already a reality around the world.
For those keeping score at home, Pisani didn’t come close to winning the election, and St. Louis came even less close to hosting the Olympics or another world’s fair. And Missouri’s trains continued to travel at speeds closer to a rock from a slingshot than a bullet.
Within a couple of years, Pisani gave up the fight. But at least he and his friends had gone down swinging—and thinking big.
And now comes President Barack “Bullet Train” Obama.
The president has made high-speed rail a centerpiece of his administration, both as a matter of economic stimulus and as a long-term strategy for transportation and the environment. So far, $8 billion has been appropriated for high-speed rail, and an intense national competition to receive project funding was nearing resolution as SLM went to press.
The president didn’t need to change his name to get on the ballot. There are no headlines trumpeting “Forward-Looking National Man” pushing for the bullet train. He doesn’t travel with a VHS tape showing footage of high-speed trains from Europe.
But in at least one respect, President Obama’s argument isn’t far afield from that of Bullet Train Pisani: He’s on a mission to drum up excitement for high-speed rail service by urging Americans to look to Spain and other foreign success stories for inspiration.
“This is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future,” Obama said in unveiling his high-speed rail program last April. “It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is, it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.
“In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth, remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations,” Obama said. “In Spain, a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined.”
Obama went on to cite the rapid success that China is enjoying, with such a bold commitment to high-speed trains that it is expected to have the most mileage in the world within five years. And of course, there’s Japan, the first country to build a high-speed system in rebuilding an infrastructure destroyed by, of all things, the bombs of World War II.
Meanwhile, America, which once prided itself as the world leader in invention, entrepreneurship, and national progress, has been left to choke on the fumes of its pathetic transportation system. From the ultrapolluting, overcrowded highways to the deteriorating airline industry to the nearly extinct railroads, the U.S. should hang its head.
A serious commitment to follow other nations with high-speed rail could change that picture dramatically. But it will take a miraculous attitude adjustment, because it flies in the face of the nation’s addiction to all things automotive.
Also, it would require a patient and costly long-term commitment that is not consistent with the instant gratification that voters have been conditioned to expect from government. Political fortunes rise and fall on one central question from the electorate: What have you done for my pocketbook lately?
Moving the mountain to high-speed rail might be a more ambitious undertaking for Obama than healthcare reform. But if he’s successful, it could be the president’s most lasting legacy.
There’s still little evidence that high-speed rail has truly captured the nation’s attention, but that’s not so in the world of transportation funding, where states and regions are competing fiercely for the federal stimulus dollars. At least they are thinking big.
Voters in California did pass an initiative in November 2008 to authorize $9 billion in funding for a high-speed rail system that would be built by 2030, but the finances are not yet in place. Florida voters authorized a bullet-train system in 2000, but strangely repealed its funding in 2004. Now, with the unfunded structure for a system still in place, Florida is scrambling along with something like 40 other states for a piece of the Obama Administration’s new high-speed rail pie.
Closer to home, Missouri and Illinois also are seeking high-speed rail funding.
This is where the issue gets a bit confusing, because “high-speed” can have very different meanings.
If you hear news in the short run about “high-speed” rail breakthroughs in Illinois and Missouri, it would most likely involve federal stimulus funds for upgrades to existing rail service. Illinois would be trying to crawl before it walks by bringing trains averaging 79 mph up to 110 mph.
Missouri, meanwhile, would be trying to wriggle before it crawls, bringing its 79 mph up to—uh—79 mph. In our state, it seems, a great accomplishment would be to build upon recent years of progress in simply eliminating delays that once rendered Amtrak service as slow as 41 mph average between St. Louis and Kansas City.
But a truly high-speed system—such as the ones in Europe and Asia—actually has nothing to do with short-range efforts to upgrade existing rail service. It would run on entirely different tracks, physically and politically.
The one to watch for is the one envisioned by Pisani some two decades ago.
The most exciting prospect in the Midwest—albeit one far from happening today—is a 220 mph high-speed train system promoted by the Midwest High Speed Rail Association (MHSRA), based in Chicago (the proposed hub linking numerous cities). A study prepared for the association last summer found that it would be feasible to build a system for $11.5 billion that would connect St. Louis and Chicago in less than two hours.
One of the largest funders of the high-speed rail study was St. Louis’ own Civic Progress, the organization of CEOs of the area’s largest companies. Tom Irwin, Civic Progress’ executive director, says such a rail system would be “a real game-changer” for the local economy.
(Herein lies a bit of local irony. Pisani claims that one of the main reasons his effort was unsuccessful was that Civic Progress’ leadership put the brakes on it. Go figure.)
It’s all about thinking big.
Can you imagine hopping on a train in St. Louis and arriving in Chicago in 1 hour, 52 minutes? How about getting to the Illinois statehouse in Springfield in 37 minutes, or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in just over an hour?
Now imagine another high-speed train running at similar speeds west to Kansas City through Columbia. Imagine what that might mean to the local and state economies, not to mention the linkage of the state universities with each other and the major research institutions in St. Louis. The possibilities are endless.
This is not a science-fiction fantasy: It’s precisely what has been happening for decades in Japan and Europe, and what is now happening at a breakneck pace in China.
MHSRA was founded in the early 1990s for the purpose of getting this sort of system constructed, right around the time Pisani was spreading the gospel in Missouri, at the time to no avail. The Chicago organization hasn’t exactly rolled in American success stories until Obama arrived on the scene.
That isn’t lost on Richard Harnish, MHSRA’s executive director.
“This is the time, right now, when we have to decide we’re going to build the 220 [mph train],” Harnish says. “We can’t afford to wait any longer.”
Harnish? Never heard of him.
But he sounds like a “forward-looking local man.” He sounds a little like Rich “Bullet Train” Pisani.
Maybe the story will have a different ending this time. But only if—with a little prodding from the president—America learns to think big again.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
