(The following column by Mike Thomas appeared on the Orlando Sentinel website on April 6.)
ORLANDO, Fla. — We bungled away light rail in the 1990s.
Could we now lose commuter rail in the 2000s?
Here is the short answer: All things are possible, and in this state, that even includes insane things.
That said, let’s go over the plan.
CSX runs freight trains into Florida on a main line coming down from Georgia.
It forks into two lines north of Jacksonville.
The eastern fork heads south through Jacksonville, Sanford, Winter Park, Orlando and Kissimmee. That’s the one we know and hate so well.
The western fork heads south past Gainesville, through Ocala and into Polk County.
The two tracks connect east of Tampa, merging into a single line that heads down to Miami.
The commuter-rail plan calls for the state to buy 61 miles of track that runs through Central Florida. This purchase would account for $150 million of the total project price tag of about $1.2 billion — a cost shared by the federal, state and local governments.
CSX then would have to shift some of its train traffic to the other line.
When you move freight trains from one track to another, you invariably make people unhappy. In this case, most of the unhappy people are in Lakeland. The city would get hit with four added freight trains, in addition to the 12 that already run through it. A few of them would be the never-ending, widely despised coal trains headed to OUC.
So it’s not surprising that the leading foe of our commuter rail is state Sen. Paula Dockery from Lakeland.
Normally that wouldn’t be a problem because our Sen. Dan Webster can beat up their Sen. Paula Dockery.
But, alas, she has been quite adept at stirring up a fuss and dragging others into the fray, including the meddling media.
Perhaps the biggest issue is liability.
As part of the deal, CSX would keep sending freight trains through Central Florida during hours when it does not interfere with the commuter trains. CSX would pay the state $10 million a year to do this.
This raises the possibility that someday, someone could fall asleep at the switch and there could be a collision involving the two kinds of trains. The odds are remote. But darn the luck, just last month near Boston, a CSX freight car broke free from a lumberyard and slammed into a commuter train, injuring 150 riders.
CSX has wisely avoided accepting liability when such accidents occur. In its deal with Florida, CSX would not be responsible for any damages it causes to commuter trains or passengers, even if the accident is the company’s fault.
‘A dangerous precedent’?
So Florida would take on that liability and buy a $200 million insurance policy for $2 million a year. One assumes this would come out of the $10 million CSX pays to lease the tracks.
Sen. Dockery calls this “a dangerous precedent.” The Palm Beach Post calls it a “railway bailout” and notes that Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink opposes the commuter-rail agreement.
To be accurate, Sink thinks Orlando’s commuter rail is a wonderful idea. She simply is researching language in the liability agreement to assess the state’s risk. Her office says it is very similar to the liability agreement CSX already has with the state over the South Florida Tri-Rail commuter train.
That serves Palm Beach and is strongly supported by the Post. So I suggest that if we kill our commuter rail because of this liability agreement, then next we shut down Tri-Rail.
Similar liability deals
CSX also has the same liability deal with several other states and Amtrak. It is, as they say, boilerplate. Whether we like it or not, CSX simply has no interest in turning its tracks over to commuter trains if that makes it a target for personal-injury attorneys. And so it won’t.
Sen. Dockery also has complained about a $144 million increase in the cost of the rail project. But that increase concerns road overpasses transportation officials say would be built anyway.
The normally reliable St. Petersburg Times, meanwhile, wrote kind of a garbled editorial. Apparently unsure what to think, it went with the cop-out of delaying everything for more studies. Do these people work for a newspaper or government bureaucracy?
Here’s an idea. While we’re at it, let’s study how much Central Florida taxpayers are subsidizing hurricane-insurance premiums for homeowners in St. Petersburg.
Megalopolis inevitable
This is all so foolish. Like it or not — and I don’t particularly — Central Florida will be a huge megalopolis. The value of a mass-transit corridor running through the center of it will be incalculable.
Consider the real possibility of a future oil crisis, the congestion on Interstate 4, the need to think outside the automobile, the worsening problems of air and atmospheric pollution.
Consider all that and then do something we never do in this state.
Let’s look ahead 20 years. And when we do, it puts all this political, parochial nit-picking in perspective.
Anyone who lets this deal fall through is short on sight and sense.