(The Associated Press circulated the following article on August 17.)
TUPELO, Miss. — Dozens of residents from across Lee County attended a meeting here to look over a $2.2 million study on ways to ease traffic congestion from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad’s busy tracks.
Beverly Chappell, one of those attending Tuesday’s public meeting, wasn’t pleased as she examined a map of possible alternative routes to redirect the lines outside of downtown Tupelo.
One route would cut across her mother’s property near U.S. 78. The others, regardless of their potential benefits, seem to her to be too expensive.
“I’m against spending $750 million on an inconvenient train track when people on the Gulf Coast are still living in FEMA trailers,” the 58-year-old Chappell said. “I’ve lived in Tupelo all my life and I drive through Crosstown multiple times a day. I only wait for a train once or twice a week, and it’s no big deal.”
The study, which began last August, has identified several ways to ease traffic congestion from BNSF’s tracks, including one to tweak the existing railroad route for improved efficiency, one to build a train overpass along the existing route, one to build an overpass for vehicular traffic, and five to construct alternate tracks that bypass downtown.
The price tag for the projects range from $70.7 million for the tweaking option, to $747.2 million for an alternate route. Depending on which one gets picked, the alternative could spare between 700,000 and 4.1 million automobiles from daily train delays and the ripple-effect congestion.
Although Chappell was not alone in rejecting some or all efforts to remedy the situation, others at the two-hour open house voiced support for the plans.
James Jenkins endorsed a plan that would reroute the train to the west of Tupelo and bring it closer to the Furrs community. He said it would be worth hearing the occasional train whistle near his home to ease congestion in his birthplace of Tupelo.
Tim and Vickie Allred also like that option, but for the opposite reason – it’s the farthest path from their Tupelo house, which currently sits 200 feet off the tracks and endures the vibrations and sounds of about 25 daily trains.
“It’s also the farthest path from all the development in the northern part of the county,” Tim Allred said.
That northern part includes Saltillo, and Mayor Bill Williams worried that four proposed routes going east of Tupelo before heading north and then west through his city would impede residential expansion there.
“All these routes to the north will have a big negative impact on our community – forty freight trains a day is not something we want,” Williams said. “We don’t want another Crosstown in Saltillo 15 years from now.”
Williams attended the second of three meetings that study members held this week. The first, on Monday, involved resource agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park Service. The second, held Tuesday morning, invited public officials from across the county.
Chad Luedtke, vice president of Omaha-based HDR Engineering, which heads the study, said Saltillo would not endure the same traffic congestion as in Tupelo because the trains would not pass as many at-grade intersections; they would go over or under bridges.
In any case, “the probability of a final alternative meeting any of the proposed alignments is zero,” said Wayne Parrish, Mississippi Department of Transportation planning manager for the study.
Officials noted that the alternatives could change entirely after study members get more input from resource agencies, public officials and residents.
Jocelyn Pritchett, a transportation planner with Jackson-based ABMB Engineers, a project participant, said the process will also help determine the objective of the project – to fix just Crosstown or to improve all of Northeast Mississippi.
The study now enters the environmental phase, where members will work with various agencies and the public to refine their solutions and study each one’s environmental impacts.