(The following column by Greg Hinz appeared on Crain’s Chicago Business website on August 9.)
CHICAGO — Pregnant women will have to deliver in back seats. Whole subdivisions will burn. Productivity will plummet as fire trucks and cars alike are stuck in traffic.
That’s the story that opponents of a pending big railroad merger in the Chicago area have peddled in recent weeks in a highly effective media blitz to pressure federal authorities to reject the deal. As that great liberal populist U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Wood Dale, thundered in a press release last week, “In CN’s eyes, we are nothing more than speed-bumps on the way to an enhanced bottom line.”
Mr. Roskam’s reference is to Canadian National Railway Corp., which is buying the Elgin Joliet & Eastern railroad. But despite what he and a bipartisan posse of suburban Congress folk have been saying, there are two sides to this story.
In fact, while it needs a bit of massaging, the EJ&E deal would mean a big boost for the Chicago-area economy. Its flaws are being grossly exaggerated. And to the extent the deal would worsen traffic, access or safety in one town or neighborhood, it would improve life in another.
CN proposes to stop running dozens of freight trains a day through the city and mostly inner suburbs. Instead, it would move them to EJ&E tracks that encircle Chicago about 30 miles out from the Loop.
CN figures it could run trains much faster in mostly uncluttered, far suburbia rather than going through the city, which can take as long to traverse as it does for a train to get here from L.A. CN’s probably right, and to the extent Chicago can boost its efficiency, the city can improve its competitive position.
The opponents live along the EJ&E line, in places such as Lake Zurich and Barrington, Naperville and Park Forest. They say they fear the impact of trains with an average projected length of 6,321 feet rumbling through town and blocking streets. I have to concede that, if I lived there, I wouldn’t be thrilled either — any more than I used to like living a half-block from the el or under a major flight path into O’Hare.
But the foes are overstating their case.
To start, the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, which regulates mergers, found only 15 crossings along the 200-mile-long EJ&E line where traffic would be “substantially affected.” That’s defined as an intersection at which all cars and trucks collectively would be delayed more than 40 hours a day — about five minutes each for a crossing in which 500 cars are delayed.
Second, while foes talk tons about how train traffic would triple or even quadruple in their area, it would drop at least as much elsewhere. For instance, on one CN line in the south suburbs and on the South Side of the city, freight traffic would go from as many as 21 trains a day to two trains or even no trains, depending on the track involved. Similarly, traffic on a CN line through Libertyville, Des Plaines and Schiller Park would be cut 90% or more.
Don’t those people count, too? As Buffalo Grove Trustee Jeffrey Berman put it in a bit of overlooked testimony, “Thousands of people in towns that abut the existing CN lines stand to benefit.” Or as Elmwood Park Mayor Peter Silvestri says, “We have to move some of this traffic out of our inner suburbs and the city, because it’s, frankly, choking us.”
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Highland Park, says Metra could add two badly needed rush-hour round trips a day if freight traffic were diverted from a CN line Metra now uses in his district. His suggestion: build tunnels under those 15 “substantially affected” crossings for emergency vehicles.
Mr. Kirk is on the right track, as is U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Chicago, who holds similar views. Some mitigation is needed. But the billions of dollars foes are demanding to build bridges and other crossovers at dozens of crossings is a deal killer.
A congressman represents his or her constituents. The board’s job is to represent us all.