(The following story by Doug Midkiff appeared on the Knoxville News-Sentinel website on September 8. Doug Midkiff has spent 64 years in the transportation industry.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — According to transportation experts, the nation is entering a mobility crisis that appears to be ignored by the present administration and by a partisan-divided Congress, but it doesn’t take a transportation expert to see that we are in trouble.
One has only to travel the nation’s federal highway system to see that it is becoming increasingly clogged with heavy truck traffic.
Interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley and Interstate 40 through Knoxville are prime examples.
When one tops Bearden Hill while heading west on Kingston Pike, and views parallel I-40 off to the north, the line of trucks looks like an intermodal freight train barreling down the Norfolk Southern tracks.
Or take a trip on an airline and suffer the consequences of an overcrowded system, where air traffic is guided by an outmoded air traffic control system. A recent report showed that one-third of the flights were late, adding insult to the indignities of being crammed into too-narrow seats, reduced in size so the airlines can squeeze out every dollar of revenue. Unfortunately, those problems are not made any easier by the understandable need for security checks.
A mobility crisis is a federal problem simply because it is vitally important to the health of the nation from an energy-consumption standpoint, as well as for the quality of life in this country, that we have safe, clean, frequent, reliable and reasonably speedy passenger rail service, as an alternative to the crowded highways with energy-consuming vehicles and the crowded and stress-creating airlines.
More and more people are coming to that conclusion, including people in positions of authority and in Congress. It has finally sunk in that Amtrak will never make a profit, which I have been preaching for years, but successive administrations have tried to starve Amtrak in the federal budget on the premise that it should, although no inter-city passenger rail service in the world makes a profit.
I believe Amtrak should be financed by a portion of highway trust fund money and used in the same way tax money is spent to fund the federal highway system, with a percentage of each state’s rail cost coming from federal funds apportioned to the number of rail-passenger miles in a given state.
The concrete and asphalt lobby and the highway construction lobby have fought this type of funding for years, but as we all know, it is time to stop laying down new strips of asphalt and concrete whenever highways get crowded. As has been proven in Knoxville, they fill up with traffic as soon as they are completed.
Furthermore, according to an American Association of Highway and Transportation officials study, in terms of pavement wear, one truck, weighting the authorized maximum gross weight of 80,000 pounds, can do the damage of over 9,000 automobiles, a finding that trucking interests naturally dispute.
We need to convince Congress that a crisis exists, a crisis that will affect our nation and more people than the bankruptcy of Penn-Central and the other Northeastern railroads. In response to that crisis, Congress took bold action that led to passage of acts to enable the railroads and created Amtrak and Conrail.
In 1980, it passed the Staggers Act to partially deregulate the freight railroads, with provisions to make abandonment and mergers easier. I was an active participant in those events.
Now, the few remaining railroad giants need to join hands with passenger rail in lobbying Congress and restore the days when the freight haulers used their flagship trains as an advertisement of their good service.