I attended the Public Hearing held on 5 February 2018 at the Woodward Elementary School in Cypress, Texas. The following are my comments.
1. I was surprised that the project was called “Dallas to Houston” for an event in Houston since the train will go back and forth.
2. The preferred route is myopic. We should look to Europe for their general strategy of bullet train routes – they connect centers of population. Therefore the plan from the early 90’s – where the route went from Houston to College Station, to Waco, to I believe Waxahachie (the site of the now defunct SSC) and then Dallas – makes more sense. That plan intended to eventually have lines from Waco, to Austin, to San Antonio and from Austin to Houston. DASH was the acronym, a marketing name that made sense (see comment 1). That plan also connected most of the major academic institutions in Texas and it would have made College Station, for example, basically a suburb of Houston and vice versa.
3. I live in Houston and the main reason I went to the Public Hearing was to listen to the rural land owners. Most of their comments made sense:
a. While connecting Houston to Dallas with basically a straight line may make sense graphically, it makes no sense given where the roads are and were people are. Why not use the existing ROWs in middle of existing highways?
b. Why hasn’t the private company taken a group of the folks against the train to an actual installation in Asia to prove that sound will not be an issue? Probably because it will be.
4. The proposed train is ugly. Especially when compared to Germany’s ICE and France’s TGV.
5. Whatever track/structure is built has to accommodate for new technologies like Hyperloop.
6. The two tracks could be stacked and need to start at IAH and run primarily in the middle/side/in the ROW of highways Sam Houston, 290, 6, and 35 to Hillsboro and then end at DFW. The cities of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth would then have to have reasonable train lines from the airport to their respective downtowns.
7. The start to end of travel time has to be less than 4 hours – start point meaning someone’s house, and endpoint being their final destination in the other city. Regardless of the current mode of travel, 4 hours is basically the time it takes. I commuted from Houston to Fort Worth every week for 8 months and decided to drive instead of fly because of the convenience of having my own car when I got to Fort Worth.
8. The cost of the round trip ticket must be less than than the cost of driving a car if the intended passengers are those traveling for leisure and less than the cost of airplane uber/rental car for those traveling for business.
9. Unless item 7 and 8 happen, the notion that most of the current airplane traffic is going to switch to high speed rail is dubious.
The proposed plan does not make sense environmentally, technically or economically.
Saman Ahmadi, PE, AIA
the City 