State transportation head doubts passenger rail service is a real possibility for South Dakota

The head of the South Dakota Department of Transportation dismissed the possibility of passenger rail in the state during a meeting of the Railroad Authority Board on Wednesday.

Secretary Joel Jundt addressed the topic during the board’s first meeting since the Federal Railroad Administration presented a map of possible passenger rail futures that, for the first time, presented a possible route through South Dakota.

South Dakota is the only state in the contiguous United States to have never had service from Amtrak, the government-subsidized rail corporation that consolidated the majority of passenger rail lines in the 1970s.

Latest Amtrak study maps include potential routes through Sioux Falls, Rapid City

The Federal Railroad Administration is in the midst of a multi-year Long Distance Rail Service Study. Maps showing possible routes through Sioux Falls, Pierre and Rapid City appeared in February.

Kellie Beck, the director of finance and management for the state DOT, told the railroad board that she’d participated in two of the meetings for that federal study on behalf of the state. 

She told the board of the recently released maps, but also noted that Jundt had been part of a previous passenger rail study in 2021 that concluded passenger rail wouldn’t be viable in South Dakota for many years.

She also reminded the board that the state’s status as one of three without passenger rail means that it gets “Special Transportation Circumstance” grants every year from the federal government, which the state has used for cargo rail and other projects. 

“As you guys are aware, we’ve funded a lot of projects and have done a lot of short-line projects to promote and enhance economic development,” Beck said. “In ’22, and ’23, we were allocated close to $27 million each year.”

Jundt chimed in at that point to offer his take on the study’s South Dakota maps from the DOT’s perspective. A passenger rail project would be expensive — “over a billion dollars and more than that,” Jundt said — and he doesn’t see South Dakota’s low population “rising to the top from a high priority standpoint” in the months and years ahead. Costs for some other long passenger rail projects have run into the tens of billions.

“From a concept standpoint, I think it would be a great thing to have passenger rail in South Dakota for tourism and everything else,” Jundt said. “But I think once they truly get into understanding the dynamics and the cost to do this, it might not look as favorable as just the concept.”

Rail advocate Dan Bilka disputed that during the Wednesday meeting.

The current study focuses on long-distance routes. The 2021 study focused on state-supported routes – shorter routes with a higher level of ongoing state-level funding.

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“It’s comparing apples to oranges,” said Bilka, head of a nonprofit organization called All Aboard Northwest.

The long-distance study, by contrast, “isn’t about ridership, or those farebox recovery metrics that have been used to basically leave us out of consideration for decades.” A farebox is used to collect passenger fares.

The current study is meant to identify routes that would best serve both rural and urban transportation needs, enhance existing long-distance routes and “reflect public engagement” on passenger rail. 

“That’s why we might be actually a higher priority than some of these other ones that might overlap with state supported services,” Bilka said of the South Dakota proposals.

Jundt said his reference to ridership and priorities was tied to his review of the other routes on the long-distance study, not a repetition of the 2021 conclusions. 

The board took no action on passenger rail, and no board members expressed an opinion on the topic.