Obama Keeps Focus on Economy on Florida Trip

TAMPA — President Obama on Thursday turned his attention to trying to rebuild the economy as he arrived here to announce an investment of $8 billion in high-speed rail projects, the first of several White House initiatives to accelerate job growth across the country.

“One in 10 Americans is out of jobs,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s why creating jobs has to be our No. 1 priority in 2010.”

A day after delivering the State of the Union address, the president took his economic message on the road in the first of a series of trips outside Washington. He began his full-scale pivot to the economy by focusing on high-speed rail projects, a tangible thing that many voters can see in their own neighborhoods or states.

“I’m going to come back down here and ride it,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to a cheering crowd of 3,000 people in an arena at the University of Tampa.

The projects, scattered across the country, include startup money to help build trains in California and Florida. For months, states have been engaged in a bidding war over the money, which comes from the economic stimulus plan approved a year ago.

Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came to Florida to announce the projects, which ultimately could go from Tampa to Orlando. The president and vice president rarely travel together, but Mr. Biden has overseen the economic stimulus plan and introduced Mr. Obama to the crowd in a visit that resembled a campaign rally.

“It will change the way we travel and change the way we live,” Mr. Biden said. “Just like the interstate highway did back in the mid-50s.”

Several members of the Cabinet and other top administration officials made similar announcements on Thursday in cities across the country as part of the economic roll-out strategy by the White House.

Most of the money will go to improving existing rail service — paving the way for faster service, but not for the kind of bullet trains that zip along faster than 150 miles an hour in Japan and Europe. More than a billion dollars, for instance, will go to speed train travel between Chicago and St. Louis to up to 110 miles per hour — faster than it is now, but a far cry from the super fast trains that are increasingly common elsewhere.

But two of the largest pots of money being distributed are being devoted to actual bullet train projects.

The administration on Thursday announced that it would award $2.25 billion to help California make a small down payment on its ambitious $45 billion plan to build trains that can go 220 miles an hour. The stimulus money will go to purchase right-of-way, build track, and do engineering and environmental work.

Another $1.25 billion will go to build 84 miles of track from Tampa to Orland that would allow trains to travel at up to 168 miles per hour, the first leg of a corridor that is eventually expected to go to Miami.

The Florida stretch, which the administration says it expects to be completed by 2014, would have the advantage of showing people what could be achieved quickly. But since it takes only 90 minutes to drive between the two cities, by the administration’s estimate, it could prove difficult to get people to forgo their cars for trains, which would save them a little more than half an hour in travel time.

But relatively little of the money is going to the most-traveled rail line in the United States, the northeast corridor running from Boston through New York to Washington, D.C., which is receiving just $112 million for engineering and environmental work for a new tunnel in Baltimore, and a new station at BWI airport, among other projects.

The northeast corridor is already home to the Acela, which is the United States’s fastest train. But although the trains are capable of top speeds of 150 miles an hour, they average only 84 miles an hour between New York and Washington because the tracks they run on are curvy, and are shared with many other trains. Railroad officials have said that the work required to significantly speed up trains on the corridor would be costly.

States competed fiercely for the money: 37 states and the District of Columbia put in applications for projects costing a total of $57 billion, Joseph C. Szabo, the federal railroad administrator, said at a conference in Washington earlier this month. And railroad companies from around the world, seeing the potential for a huge new market in the United States, have stepped up their lobbying efforts considerably.

For months the administration has tried to strike a balance between getting people excited about rail again, and tempering expectations by reminding them that it will take years, and much more than $8 billion, to get real high speed rail benefits.

“New lines will not be built overnight, and a sustained investment over time will be needed to achieve results,” Mr. Szabo said.

By JEFF ZELENY and MICHAEL COOPER, nytimes.com