The High-Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965
Public Law 89-220, 79 Stat. 893
was the first attempt by the U.S. Congress to foster the growth of

high-speed rail High-speed rail (HSR) is a type of rail system that runs significantly faster than traditional rail, using an integrated system of specialised rolling stock and dedicated tracks. While there is no single standard that applies worldwide, lines ...

in the U.S. The High Speed Ground Transportation Act was introduced immediately following the creation of Japan's first high-speed

Shinkansen The , colloquially known in English as the bullet train, is a network of high-speed railway lines in Japan. Initially, it was built to connect distant Japanese regions with Tokyo, the capital, to aid economic growth and development. Beyond l ...

, or "bullet train" and was signed into law by President

Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...

as part of his

Great Society The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The term was first coined during a 1964 commencement address by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the University ...

infrastructure building initiatives. Johnson's remarks upon signing the bill included the following:

In recent decades, we have achieved technological miracles in our transportation. But there is one great exception. We have airplanes which fly three times faster than sound. We have television cameras that are orbiting Mars. But we have the same tired and inadequate mass transportation between our towns and cities that we had 30 years ago. Today, as we meet here in this historic room where Abigail Adams hung out her washing, an astronaut can orbit the earth faster than a man on the ground can get from New York to Washington. Yet, the same science and technology which gave us our airplanes and our space probes, I believe, could also give us better and faster and more economical transportation on the ground. And a lot of us need it more on the ground than we need it orbiting the earth. So I hope this meeting this morning will provide a platform for us to get that kind of transportation. We must do it. We must start getting it now. In the past 15 years, travel between our cities has more than doubled. By 1985--only 20 years away--we will have 75 million more Americans in this country. And those 75 million will be doing a great deal more traveling. So, we must find ways to move more people, to move these people faster, and to move them with greater comfort and with more safety. This bill is a first step toward accomplishing some of those objectives.

One product of the bill was the creation of regular Metroliner service between

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

, at speeds which averaged 90.1 miles per hour (145 km/h), faster than even

Acela Express The ''Acela'' ( ; originally the ''Acela Express'' until September 2019) is Amtrak's flagship service along the Northeast Corridor (NEC) in the Northeastern United States between Washington, D.C. and Boston via 13 intermediate stops, includ ...

trains operated between the two cities in 2012. The bill also resulted in the creation of the Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation in the Department of Commerce. Senator

Claiborne Pell Claiborne de Borda Pell (November 22, 1918 – January 1, 2009) was an American politician and writer who served as a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island for six terms from 1961 to 1997. He was the sponsor of the 1972 bill that reformed the Basic ...

was thanked by President Johnson for his persistence in pushing the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 through congress and repeatedly bringing the issue to the president's attention. The High Speed-Ground Transportation Act received broad

bi-partisan Bipartisanship, sometimes referred to as nonpartisanship, is a political situation, usually in the context of a two-party system (especially those of the United States and some other western countries), in which opposing political parties find co ...

support with only 23 out of 432 members of the

U.S. House of Representatives The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they ...

voting against the act.

Later attempts to build high-speed rail in the U.S.

President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

repeatedly asked Congress for funding for high-speed rail projects.The slow death of Obama’s high-speed rail continues, by Conn Carroll, September 26, 2012, ''Washington Examiner'' http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-slow-death-of-obamas-high-speed-rail-continues/article/2509100#.UMGmasozE7B However, no high-speed rail projects had been completed by the end of his second term in 2017.

References

{{reflist High-speed rail in the United States United States federal transportation legislation Act