County board to give final consideration on high-speed rail resolution
URBANA — The appointment of a new board member and consideration of a resolution on high-speed passenger trains are the highlights of an abbreviated Champaign County Board meeting Thursday.
The meeting will be at 7 p.m. at the Brookens Administrative Center, 1776 E. Washington St., U. A number of other routine items are on the agenda, including the appointment of several people to drainage district boards, approval of intergovernmental agreements for school resource officers at St. Joseph-Ogden High School, St. Joseph grade school, the Fisher school district, the Unit 7 school district and the Prairieview-Ogden school district, and an update on the financial condition of the county nursing home.
Mahomet Republican Gary Maxwell, a retired engineer, will be welcomed to the board and sworn in at Thursday's meeting. Maxwell, who will represent District 1 in the northwest quadrant of the county, replaces Larry Sapp, who stepped down from the board earlier this summer.
The other major item on the agenda is adoption of a resolution in support of an integrated network of high speed trains in the Midwest. The resolution proved controversial at last week's committee of the whole meeting, when most of the board's Republicans voted against it.
The resolution states in part that the board "fully supports an integrated network of high-speed trains and expanded Amtrak service as a key to economic development, job creation and increased fuel efficiency."
It also says that the board "calls on Congress to provide the pathway for funding the high speed rail program by facilitating and creating partnerships with private entities."
MoreSome guy at the car wash was saying how fuel efficient his new BMW automobile was. Wow ok so he gets 3 to 4 more mpg than I do, but he paid over $25K more for it up front, and no way is that more efficient over the life of the automobile. High speed rail right here right now makes no sense for so many reasons. It's just a money grab.
I see tremendous geek appeal and I like going fast, but this doesn't seem to be addressing any particular current need. We already have pretty good travel options in/out of C-U.
I think instead of high-speed rail, I'd rather have a high-speed rollercoaster. That would be fun, it would likely be profitable, it would be a tourist attraction, and it would generate employment.
The potential of high speed rail is in its ability to change travel patterns and bring the Champaign-Urbana area closer to centers of employment, centers of business, and centers of government, and to bring those centers closer to Champaign-Urbana. Since the early years of Mosaic and the web, one of the most frequent concerns about attracting business to Illinois and the Midwest is the large distances and the congested travel corridors that separate business centers and research centers and administrative centers --
If funding organizations are not able to reach the research centers, if administrators are hours from business centers, if students and researchers are hours from decision makers, less business is done, fewer projects are funded, fewer innovations arise from an area. The vision of high speed rail is to significantly reduce the time between these different centers and reduce the inconveniences and barriers of travel throughout the Midwest region.
Champaign-Urbana is envisioned as the center for routes from Chicago to Springfield/St. Louis, Indianapolis/Columbus/Cincinnati, and Cleveland. At build-out, researcher leaders in Champaign-Urbana would have connections of less than 90 minutes Door-to-Door to destinations and decision makers in these business and administration centers--without encountering Chicago traffic, without encountering the airport security lines, without losing productive hours that would be devoted to driving or to while -Turning Off All Electronic Devices- on an airplane. These decision makers could also reach the labs at the university in less than 90 minutes. The current proposal represents a way to rethink how the Midwest region operates and how its businesses and workers and researchers operate. And it seeks to accomplish this vision without significant changes in the current road system and by making changes to transportation corridors that already exist.
Whether this is worthwhile is at everyone's personal discretion. However, systems around the world have shown that it is often transformative for communities that are connected along high speed rail routes.
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