Florida Governor Rick Scott killed the Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail project, seven years after the state previously killed it once before. Scott cited three reasons for killing it: the potential for cost overruns, overly optimistic ridership projections, and the fact that, if the project turned out to be a dud and the state shut it down because it couldn’t afford to operate it, it would have to return the federal grants to the federal government.
Where does this leave Obama’s high-speed rail plan? On one hand, Immobility Secretary LaHood now has nearly $2.5 billion he can give to other states for high-speed rail. But with most of the freight railroads opposing moderate-speed rail on their tracks (the only major exception being Union Pacific in the Chicago-St. Louis corridor), projects that aim to share tracks with freight trains are going nowhere.