Fort Worth to pay $75K to study high-speed rail even as feds kill grant for program
Fort Worth City Council members agreed April 22 to spend tens of thousands of dollars studying the potential economic impact of a high-speed rail linkage to downtown.
The city plans to spend around $75,000 to assess how a high-speed rail line would affect “property owners, local businesses, and other factors” in the city center, according to Kelly Porter, Fort Worth’s assistant director of regional transportation planning and innovation. Arlington, another possible stop in train line, will chip in $183,750 to partake in the “joint study.”
“What we really need to do is understand what that full benefit to the city is going to be,” Porter said, describing the study’s purpose.
Efforts to link greater Houston to the Metroplex via bullet train have chugged along in fits and starts for the better part of a decade. Texas Central, the private company behind the endeavor, began pitching plans for a high-speed rail connection between Dallas and Houston in 2009. North Texas transit leaders have pondered and pushed for additional stops in Arlington and Fort Worth in recent years.
Advocates hail the undertaking as an essential step toward modernizing the state’s transportation system and catalyzing development along a fast-growing corridor. Some skeptical state legislators and landowners along the proposed rail route, meanwhile, have sought to stall its progress.
Fort Worth’s decision to study high-speed rail’s possible effects arrives amid fresh uncertainty surrounding the project’s future.
Amtrak signed onto the project in 2023, a partnership that yielded a roughly $64 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The Transportation Department suddenly canceled the funding April 14, the agency’s secretary, Sean Duffy, labeling the project a “waste of taxpayer funds and a distraction from Amtrak’s core mission of improving its existing subpar services.”
Fort Worth-based Kleinheinz Capital Partners, Texas Central’s lead investor, is still optimistic about the venture, now priced at more than $40 billion.
Yet substantial obstacles remain.
Hunt Realty Investments, a Dallas real estate powerhouse, said the North Central Texas Council of Governments’ plans to route the bullet train through the heart of downtown will derail its own projects nearby. Dallas City Council, sympathetic to the developer’s concerns, passed a resolution in June opposing NCTCOG’s proposed train path.
The council voted in October to pay consultants $567,000 to evaluate the bullet train’s economic impact on the city. Dallas city leaders have refused to proceed with the rail line until the study is complete.
NCTCOG floated an alternative route the following month, but the planning organization is prepping for a possible legal battle with Hunt, should the parties reach an impasse.
With financial and legal uncertainties looming overhead, Fort Worth hopes to conduct and publish the economic impact study by the end of the summer. Porter said the study would build on other city transportation analysis conducted for the Moving a Million campaign, an effort to “unify all Fort Worth’s transportation-related plans into one vision.”
Funding for the study was bundled into a larger $940,000 contract with engineering consultant AECOM approved by the Fort Worth City Council Tuesday.
The city hired the company to “determine future parking needs, conduct fiscal analysis, provide funding schemes, provide grant writing support, and complete pre-engineering” for burgeoning development across the southeastern corner of downtown.
This story was originally published April 22, 2025 at 4:08 PM.
