(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Travis Loller on October 1.)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Driving on Nashville’s interstate highways used to be no problem compared to the sprawling gridlock faced by drivers in other Southern cities such as Atlanta and Houston.
But now a booming economy in Music City has brought the inevitable traffic congestion, and four-lane interstates have grown to six, eight and 10 lanes — all crowded during rush hour.
Regional planners have been looking at rail as an alternative people-mover for more than a decade, and in September, Nashville opened the Music City Star — Tennessee’s first commuter rail line.
Nashville is not the only traditionally car-centered city looking for a way out of its traffic problems. Across the country, smaller cities not known for public transportation are looking to commuter rail to ease congestion and air pollution.
At least 31 cities have commuter rail projects in some stage of planning or development, according to January 2006 report from the American Public Transportation Association. Many are medium-sized cities including Nashville; Austin, Texas; and Charlotte, N.C.
“Twenty years ago, most Southern cities did not have the urban problems of many of their neighbors in the North,” said Joe Giulietti, chair of the American Public Transportation Association’s commuter rail committee and executive director of south Florida’s Tri-Rail system.
Commuter rail is a popular option because it uses existing freight lines, which is cheaper and faster than purchasing right of way and laying tracks for a subway or street car system or even building a dedicated bus lane, he said.
“It’s very adjustable to size,” association president William Millar said. “You can start with short trains and use existing facilities. It’s not too expensive.”
The Music City Star was built for about $40 million and operates one line with six round trips each day traveling the 32 miles between the city of Lebanon and Nashville’s downtown. The first day of operation saw 784 riders, many of whom said they were sightseers with no intention of riding daily. Riders decreased to about 500 on the following two days.
One rider, Carolyn Humphreys, said she intends to commute on the train regularly.
“I told my husband, ‘This could be addictive,’ ” she said.
William Redmond is a Nashville native who was the first person to buy a monthly pass when they went on sale. He called the service “long overdue.”
Although rail planners hope the number of daily riders will triple within nine months, even 1,500 riders a day is not likely to impress critics who argue that cities like Nashville are too small and too car-dependent for a rail system to succeed.
Transit consultant Tom Rubin said the money the line will cost is not justified by the number of projected riders, which he called “pathetic.”
Giulietti said the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach train in south Florida is proof that commuter rail can succeed in cities like Nashville that grew up around interstates.
“After a few years, people will be screaming for how to get more service,” he said. “Businesses will move closer to the lines, and there will be demands for how to put lines in this location, how to connect to the airport.”
Florida’s Tri-Rail, which opened in 1989, had so many problems after five years of operation that officials considered shutting it down. But this spring, the rail completed a major expansion and saw service jump by 35 percent to almost 13,000 daily riders.
Rubin said Tri-Rail’s success is not a predictor of what will happen elsewhere.
“That’s an interesting corridor because it has the ocean on one side and the (Everglades) swamp on the other,” he said. “It’s a long, narrow corridor with people going in both directions. … It’s also pretty dense.”
In Nashville, workers live in suburbs on all sides of the city, and the Lebanon-to-Nashville route is only the first spur of what could be a system with seven lines radiating from downtown like spokes from a wheel.
But to add future commuter rail lines, officials will have to persuade railroad operator CSX Corp. to let commuters use its tracks.
“We’ve had productive, positive discussions,” said Gary Sease, spokesman for CSX, based in Jacksonville, Fla.
“But those rails are very, very busy.”
The current line runs on tracks owned by a local company, the Nashville and Eastern Railroad Corp. Commuter rail was a boon for that company, general manager Craig Wade said, because the Music City Star made improvements to the tracks and pays to use them during the day. The company ships freight only at night.
Existing commuter rail lines like the Virginia Railway Express are finding their trains in conflict with freight trains more often as both try to increase capacity along the same sets of tracks, said VRE spokesman Mark Roeber.
CSX’s Sease said, “For about the past three years, freight demand has continued to increase at a virtually unprecedented rate. … All things considered, we would prefer to focus exclusively on freight, but from a public policy standpoint, that’s not completely possible.”