RAIL: A little used Carolina resource
Since World War II, America has embarked upon an improving its Highway Systems. 46,000 Interstate miles, without stoplights or grade crossings, were built. Miles of connectors, bypasses, beltways and new rural roads have been put in place. Important was, safety, convenience, accessibility, and increased capacity. Less attention and concern, at the time, was driving speed, trips would be quicker and shorter and void of obstacles. It was sold as a National Defense necessity. Few worried about air pollution or the environment. No one thought about energy waste, land disruption, safety, and time wasted traveling. Nor was there much thought about its removal of farmland and its transgression of private property rights. The costs of all the above concerns remained hidden as, each year, they increased.
User fees and special taxes designed primarily to amortize construction cost and maintenance, have fallen behind inflation and the need for increased improvements. The American Trucking Associations concluded in 1999 that their trucks alone, was responsible for $30 billion in annual cost. Much more than they pay in user fee or special taxes. Thus, providing them an undeserved and unintended subsidy.
This highway passenger/freight system is failing. We have found that we cannot build our way out of gridlock. Rush hour in Chicago now exceeds eight hours per day. I-40 in the Research Triangle Park is often reduced speeds of less then 5 mph. The average cost of operating an automobile now exceeds forty cents a mile. It currently cost about $6,000 a year to operate a car, or $500 after tax dollars per month (15,000 miles per year, average in 1999). Further, we are completely at the mercy of foreign petroleum pricing with only 40% of our needs provided domestically. A fact that has and can make depending on automobile for commuting, extremely risky
We cannot solve our transportation needs by adding ever-more-costly highway lanes that take years to plan and to clear the multiple legal, political, and environmental obstacles. Obstacles that continue to become more restrictive each year.
All the while, we have ignored other transportation opportunities. A negative attitude toward rail, fostered by abuse of the past, has made us blind to a resource not being efficiently utilized. In the past 20 years inter-modal or multi-modal transportation have made amazing advances. The United States concentrated federal support for air and highways and maintained a previously developed waterway systems. Europe, Canada, and Japan concentrated on rail passenger service.
Here, using cargo containers and tying into the waterway and ocean systems, rail freight haulers have been able to improve their efficiencies to allow them to overcome heavily subsidized air and motor competition. There are further opportunities to utilized rail hardware by spreading their cost over both freight and passenger service; with passenger use bringing government subsidies matching those already being provided to other competitive modes of passenger transit.
Meanwhile the U.S. rail system offers a limited number of choices for passengers permitting voids and poor service that make using the system undesirable. We fail to benefit by more and better use of already in place rails, reserving most of our rails for freight use only. In most Central Eastern North Carolina the only passenger option is the automobile that must use depreciating, zigzagging, stoplight endowed, roadways where gridlock is common and safety compromised.
Eastern North Carolina is endowed with a rather extensive in place rail system. Union General Sherman knew how important and extensive the eastern rail system was when he attacked its hub at Goldsboro. Our rail system offers, straight-line access to the nearby robust economies of eastern cities like Raleigh/Triangle, Richmond, Virginia Beach/Norfolk, Wilmington/Myrtle Beach. This resource has been allowed to go mostly unused even for freight, not to mention the few passenger opportunities, except where routes are part of what is left of the national passenger service between Northeast cities and Florida.
Passenger and commuter rail can offer the people in Eastern North Carolina a way and means for seeking jobs at a time when our “cheap labor” industries are now moving to other areas around the world. And, rail expansion has the potential of being done quickly and at a lower cost than possible with highway improvement and new construction. The roadbeds are there, and in many cases, so is the necessary modern rail and signaling hardware. There is no need to take private property or disturb the environment. To the contrary, there will be less pollution and the opportunity of use more efficient alternate energy sources and types. In many cases, rail will be far more convenient offering direct center city access while allowing better and productive use of travel time.
The improved mobility commuter and passenger rail offers eastern North Carolina an alternative at a time when our industries are under attack and in danger. Simply put, if the jobs will not come to us, then, we will go to the jobs, commuter rail offers a way for workers to seek jobs in our robust metropolitan areas. It can, also, provide dependable connection to and from satellite plants and office annexes encouraging expanding headquartered companies of our major cities to branch out where they can operate cheaper while having safe telephone and Internet computer use during travel time, cheaper homes or a better business location. It can be done in an extremely short time frame.
Using currently existing rail rights-of-ways makes sense. They are in place. Doing so will be easier than attempting a complex and expensive new highway system that will destroy farmland, abuse property rights requiring expensive new infrastructure, and be years in planning, obtaining permits, buying rights-of-ways, and funding. Good and usable connections into other states are in place. While any newly planned limited access roads will be useless if neighboring states continue to be slow or resistance, to connecting them to their good roads and Interstate highways.
Immediate opportunities for eastern North Carolina exist, first, in commuter service from robust economies that exist in the Research Triangle Park and Metropolitan Raleigh, and, the fast growing and healthy economies just across our borders in Virginia’s Chesapeake area and Myrtle Beach area. By quickly instigating a dependable and an adequate commuter rail our freight system will be strengthen and our routes improved. This will build gridlock free access to our coastal resorts and ports, all the while making a better, more efficient, two way, system which will be more dependable system. A system attractive to distribution, and express mail businesses, and needed by heavy-industry assemblers.
This effort should be recognized for it economic development benefits as well as its transportation benefits. It will retain local service and retail jobs. It will attract satellite office development. It will benefit the business centers by reducing the demand for expanded civic services and new infrastructure. It will provide the critical mass to fund and support city quality of life projects. No need to abandon our high quality small towns or out in-country benefits. We will give new life to their infrastructure and way of life.
It should be organized and funded by city and county governments partnered with private interest. Private charitable foundations and non-profit organizations already exist that should welcome the opportunity to assist in this effort which would rescue this area currently threaten by rapid unemployment and lack of new industry.
A 2003 nighttime satellite photos clearly illustrate the growth of “metro centers” and just as clearly illustrate the unique large rural population distribution in North and South Carolina. Data indicating the recent demise of farming and manufacturing jobs signal the potential migrating of this population into metro-centers to service and high tech jobs. Current highway and rural roads are not adequate to allow these workers to commute from their current homes. Already, many of these routes are at maximum capacity and in risks of failing. We cannot wait for the necessary land acquisition, meeting legal challenges, and environmental requirements to be satisfied. Access is needed now, and only our current rail corridors offer the solution to moving large numbers of people, now. Commuter trains sharing rails previously used only for freight are doing just this elsewhere, (Baltimore, Maryland, Boston, MA, Burlington, VT, Syracuse, NY, Washington, DC, San Diego, CA, Dallas, TX, Miami, FL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA), and offering a more economical, safer, more friendly environmental transportation option, while allowing freight service to benefit from federal government subsidies designed to encourage passenger service, a plus for industry recruiting and job retention.
Sanford L Korschun
Jan 13, 2004