(The following story by John D. Boyd appeared on The Journal of Commerce website on May 4, 2010.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Declaring that “freight rail jobs are green jobs,” a report by the Blue Green Alliance and the Economic Policy Institute urges policy makers to give the rail industry tax breaks it seeks to put more freight on railroads instead of trucks and airplanes.
The report says every $1 billion of capital invested in freight rail creates about 7,800 jobs, or about $128,000 per job, that can all be counted as good for the environment or “green.”
That’s because railroads haul more freight per unit of carbon emission and energy use than trucking or aviation. “Energy savings fostered by transporting freight via rail results in lower GHGs (greenhouse gases),” it says.
Examples of the “green jobs” that it highlights include locomotive engineers, track repair crews, equipment welders and pipe fitters for the railroads and their suppliers. The study draws on numerous reports from government agencies, the national transportation commission and the rail industry. It includes editorial and technical input from the Association of American Railroads and the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department.
The Alliance is a policy activism organization launched in 2006 by the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers union and later joined by other environmental groups and unions. It also helped produce a recent report on the Los Angeles Clean Trucks Program, in which it took a position opposed to the trucking industry’s viewpoint.
The freight rail report did not address potential benefits of shifting more freight onto water transportation, which other studies say creates still lower greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Transportation recently launched a marine highways program to put more truck trailers, intermodal containers and even railcars on barges to cut emissions in congested freight traffic areas.
But it ties into repeated statements of senior DOT officials that they want to shift more freight away from congested highways and onto rail lines or waterways, as the nation rethinks its transportation policy emphasis.
The report recommends a new tax credit for “all businesses that make capacity-enhancing rail investments,” similar to a 25 percent break long sought by the large Class I freight railroads. It urges Congress to renew an expired credit for track repairs or upgrades by short line railroads, which has been repeatedly renewed in recent years but expired in December.
The report also pushes “public-private partnerships,” between freight and passenger rail systems, under which governments help pay for track upgrades or facilities on freight lines to spur greater use of passenger train travel or improve average speeds. That is in line with what the Obama administration has done by allocating about $4.5 billion of economic stimulus money to Amtrak projects in mostly Class I rail corridors.