(The following article by Eric Johnson was posted on the Long Beach Press Telegram website on February 9.)
LOS ANGELES — The Port of Los Angeles Harbor Commission on Wednesday chose BNSF Railway Company to lease and operate a planned container transfer rail yard five miles north of the port.
The yard could potentially ease truck traffic on local freeways by allowing containers arriving at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to be trucked on surface streets to the intermodal facility, where they would be loaded on trains bound for the Midwest and beyond.
Both local ports are attempting to shift as many of the more than 7 million containers they jointly receive each year to trains instead of trucks. The intermodal yard, also called a near-dock facility, would be in close proximity to the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile freight rail expressway linking the ports to railyards in downtown Los Angeles.
Each fully loaded train using the Alameda Corridor carries 250 containers, which reduces an equivalent number of truck trips, port officials say.
The two ports are also trying to incorporate on-dock rail yards into new or expanded container terminals. On-dock rail systems allow containers to be loaded directly from ships to trains.
The near-dock intermodal yard would still rely on trucks to haul containers the short distance between the ports and the new facility. The yard would be roughly bordered by Pacific Coast Highway, the Alameda Corridor and Sepulveda Boulevard on existing Los Angeles port property.
While the project has the potential to cut air pollution from the old diesel trucks that haul containers eastward, it could adversely affect a portion of west Long Beach that already contends with noise and pollution from an existing container transfer yard operated by Union Pacific Railroad.
That yard, which lies just north of the proposed BNSF yard, operates 24 hours a day, said Long Beach Councilwoman Tonia Reyes Uranga, whose district abuts the planned project.
Uranga wants to see a sound wall erected on the east side of the Terminal Island (47) Freeway to keep down noise and pollution levels from the freeway and planned intermodal yard. She said six schools in her district are located between the Long Beach (710) Freeway and the 47.
“The residents will be expecting more from BNSF than they’ve gotten from the (Union Pacific yard),” she said. “Hopefully this will be a model of a green transfer facility. We’ll be going all out to ensure that happens.”