ROANOKE, Va. — Road builders who want to widen Interstate 81 are facing a second challenge almost as difficult as the January deadline for submitting their plans, the Roanoke Times reported.
They’re expected to include railroad upgrades in their highway proposals, without using money from the railway or the state.
Construction executives have batted that dilemma around since September, when Virginia’s transportation commissioner, Philip Shucet, said he wanted rails to be part of I-81 building plans.
Shucet would like to take some truck traffic off I-81’s 325 miles through Virginia.
Builders and environmentalists looking for ways to meet that objective have focused on the Norfolk Southern Railway, which has tracks in the interstate highway corridor from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Harrisburg, Pa.
Norfolk Southern Corp. says it has talked to several potential I-81 builders, but it won’t take a lead role in solving the problem of heavy truck traffic.
Although improvements to NS tracks from Chattanooga through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley could provide the 500-mile minimum hauling distance that’s needed to make rail shipment cost-effective, construction expense is a deterrent. It would take $2.3 billion to make those tracks fast enough to compete with trucks, NS officials said, based on a rough analysis.
The railroad suggests a cheaper alternative: improving 46 miles of track between Manassas and Front Royal, for about $200 million.
Faster freight movement there could possibly entice more shippers in the Southeast-to-Northeast markets to use rail, NS has said.
The hitch: NS says it can’t invest its own money in such a project.
No dollars are likely, either, from Virginia, which has seen transportation tax referendums voted down in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
The possibility of a major, relatively quick solution to concerns about heavy truck traffic on I-81 gained impetus in January when Star Solutions, a consortium of about 25 construction companies and financiers, proposed widening the road to eight lanes and putting a toll on trucks. The trucks would get their own lanes, separate from cars.
The cost, later put at anywhere from $7 billion to $13 billion, would have been covered partly by the tolls, and by possible cash leveraging and state revenues under Virginia’s public-private transportation act. The act allows private financing of public roads and other state-owned facilities, including prisons.
The General Assembly passed legislation allowing the tolls, while truck lobbyists objected to them and questioned safety aspects of the separated lanes, particularly at interchanges.
In August, Shucet returned the Star Solutions package and three other project proposals that had been submitted under the public-private transportation act. Later, he would say that Virginia lacked consistent standards for evaluating the proposals. He wanted the Virginia Department of Transportation to take a systematic approach to the ventures instead of being manipulated by them.
24 pages of requirements
When Shucet reopened the door to public-private proposals in September, there were 24 pages of requirements for proposers. At the top of the list was a demand that proposers assume most of the financing risk.
Potential rail improvements were a new, and prominent, part of Shucet’s list. He said a rail component isn’t mandatory in an I-81 package, but he at least wants an explanation of why rail wouldn’t be practical.
The deadline for receiving the I-81 proposals is Jan. 17.
Decision-makers still won’t have a good measure of the benefits a rail component could add to the I-81 packages.
Although the General Assembly received a study in 2000 about the potential for diverting freight from trucks to intermodal shipment, the consultant didn’t gather enough information about trucks’ origin, destination and whether they were stopping in Virginia.
The study concluded that 10 percent to 20 percent of long-distance freight could be shifted to rail, but it didn’t ask shippers if they would actually make that switch. Also, it focused on “dry van” shipments and excluded tankers and local trucks, which made up 30 percent of I-81 truck traffic.
That exclusion meant the potential intermodal diversion ranged from 7 percent to 14 percent of all trucks.
Another study is under way seeking specific information from both truckers and shippers, but its results aren’t expected until September 2003, nine months after the deadline for I-81 proposals. The study is supervised by VDOT’s Department of Rail and Public Transportation and financed by a federal appropriation.
Who pays, and how?
Wiley Mitchell of Norfolk, a railroad lawyer most of his life and still a consultant to Norfolk Southern, told a Roanoke audience last week that he sees only two potential ways to pay for upgrading highways and rail lines in Virginia.
Tolls and freight surcharges, he said.
Tax increases are out. The public has voted against them in two of Virginia’s three large metropolitan areas.
Norfolk Southern can’t pay for a major track overhaul.
NS is saddled with a huge loan it took out to buy half of Conrail, the major Northeast railroad, Mitchell said. Any cash that NS is able to generate for infrastructure will be spent on its most productive routes, such as the one from Chicago to New York, Mitchell said.
He said railroads have learned in recent years that they can accept some forms of outside financing, and in some cases even government assistance, as long as the terms allow repayment through a freight surcharge and don’t restrict the railroads’ ability to operate for profit.
But there’s a limit on inventive financing by government transportation agencies.
Too, trucking companies keep an eye on how the state uses transportation revenues.
Dale Bennett of the Virginia Trucking Association said truckers are the railroads’ largest customer of intermodal shipping and can benefit from improved efficiency.
However, truckers don’t want the fuel taxes they pay to be invested by the state into railroad improvements, he said.