(The following story by Bob Tita appeared on Crain’s Chicago Business website on August 8.)
CHICAGO — An effort to untangle Chicago’s snarled railroad traffic suffered a setback when Congress earmarked far less money for the project than planners had anticipated.
With a price tag estimated at $1.5 billion, the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency (Create) program received just $100 million over the next four years in the federal transportation funding bill approved by Congress on July 29. Officials with the project, a landmark planning effort from the city, state, Metra and the nation’s six freight railroads, had expected at least $600 million and were confident they would get no less than $400 million.
The meager handout means freight delays, chronically blocked street crossings and inefficient commuter rail service on some routes will persist for years to come in the nation’s busiest rail hub.
“It was a big surprise,” says Merrill Travis, a Chicago Department of Transportation consultant on the project. “You hate to spit in the eye of $100 million, but it’s lower than our worst-case scenario.”
BUSIEST RAIL TERMINAL
The Chicago area is the nation’s busiest railroad terminal, handling more than 37,500 cars a day. That number is expected to almost double to 67,000 cars by 2020, fueled by a surge in Asian imports from West Coast ports headed inland and shippers looking to avoid the high fuel costs associated with trucking.
The additional activity is being squeezed into a 2,796-mile track network loaded with choke points and creaky, outdated infrastructure. In Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side, for example, dozens of trains grind to a halt daily as a railroad worker manually throws levers to switch tracks where seven sets of tracks converge. Plans to automate the switches have been bogged down for years by bickering among the railroads over cost and operational issues.
Freight car transit times through the region range from 22 to 36 hours. In comparison, trains traveling from the West Coast to Chicago can make the trip in 48 hours.
Canadian National Railway Co. recently rerouted some traffic away from Chicago to avoid delays. And without a more efficient rail network, other railroads could follow suit. Memphis, Tenn., another halfway point for many long-haul rail shipments, is already picking up some of the slack.
The funding shortfall also hurts the region’s job market. The railroads are one of the few local industries hiring, as they replace a generation of retiring workers. The companies expect to fill 2,000 railroad jobs, such as engineers and conductors, in the Chicago area alone by the end of the decade. Construction employment for railroad improvements is expected to add another 2,700 jobs.
At the same time, supporters of the Create project estimate the region would lose 17,000 jobs over the next 20 years if system improvements aren’t completed and shipments are diverted elsewhere.
RAILROADS PLEDGE UP TO $212 MIL.
Just where the rest of the funding will come from is unclear.
No heir apparent has stepped into the void created when the project’s biggest congressional advocate, former U.S. Rep. William Lipinski, D-Chicago, ranking minority member of the House Transportation Committee, retired last year.
The 2-year-old Create project has already received a pledge from the railroads for up to $212 million. Create officials estimate an additional $60 million might be available from the railroads and the state. That and the $100 million in the transportation bill should be enough to finance engineering work on some of the most complicated and expensive parts of the project and pay for a few street crossing separations.
But the railroads say they can’t afford to give any more after shelling out over $1 billion on local improvements since the late 1990s. One-third of the rail industry’s revenue comes from freight moving through Chicago, generating about $10 billion a year.
“We’re all experiencing very good indicators that there is going to be demand for freight rail,” says Thomas Livingston, vice-president of state relations for Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX Transportation Inc. “We’re in the process of recalibrating the project.”
Delays are particularly acute at locations where busy sets of tracks intersect, forcing some trains to halt to while others cross the intersections. The Create project calls for building bridges at six key intersections, including the one in Brighton Park, to separate rights of way. The estimated cost of the bridges alone is about $600 million.
Some of these bridges also would benefit Metra service to the southwest suburbs by allowing commuter trains to operate along uninterrupted routes. The project also includes plans for separating 25 roadway and railroad track intersections and relocating a freight train line just south of the Loop that has long been considered an impediment to residential development.
Transportation experts note that efficient use of the available money over the next four years will be critical in demonstrating the need for continued funding when the next transportation spending bill is debated in 2009. And the railroads, which for years balked at any cooperative effort in Chicago, where they all compete, will have to maintain their tenuous alliance on the project.
Speaking of the $100 million, Frank Beal, executive director of the business civic group Metropolis 2020, one of the plan’s backers, says, “It’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start.”