AUGUSTA, Ga. — The possibility of catching a train ride across Georgia depends on the lobbying savvy of a new group that is trying to blast a tunnel through a mountain of fiscal granite, the Augusta Chronicle reported.
For a moment last spring, long-sought funding looked like it might become a reality when legislators supportive of passenger rail inserted $12 million into the state budget. But when they removed the money a few days later, citing the economic downturn, it was obvious that rail had been used as a political football.
The state simply didn’t have the money, budget writers said.
With state tax revenues on the decline across the nation, state transportation officials are looking to the federal government as the only funding source with pockets deep enough to launch America into a new age of passenger rail.
“We are not in a position to finance a network of railroads,” said Lyndo Tippett, North Carolina ‘s secretary of transportation.
Georgia has its nay sayers when it comes to the viability of passenger rail, including the state’s top transportation official.
“We just don’t have the population density to support it in most of the state,” said Transportation Commissioner Tom Coleman, a former longtime state senator from Savannah.
But representatives from six Southeastern states, including Georgia, beg to differ.
The Southeastern Economic Alliance, which includes the chambers from Atlanta, Savannah and Macon, is asking Congress to join the six states in funding a high-speed rail line connecting Birmingham, Ala., to Washington via Atlanta. Branch routes would link Savannah and Jacksonville, Fla., to Atlanta and to Washington via Columbia and Raleigh, N.C.
The coalition’s leaders argue that the Southeast’s rapid growth is outpacing air and highway capacity, even with a fifth runway planned at the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield Atlanta International.
Currently, one of every four flights out of Atlanta is delayed, said Charles McCrary, the CEO of Alabama Power Co. and the alliance’s chairman in that state.
Auto travel is no better. By 2020, transportation planners are projecting a 400 percent increase in traffic on the region’s urban highways.
“We need a viable third alternative to roads and air to preserve the economic vitality of the Southeast,” Mr. McCrary said.
Historically, passenger rail has struggled for federal funding in comparison with airports and highways.
Congress spends $10 billion to $12 billion a year on the nation’s air system and nearly $40 billion on roads and bridges. Amtrak, the nationwide passenger-rail carrier created during the 1970s, gets by on $500 million to $600 million.
U.S. Rep. Jack Quinn, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Rail, said the importance of passenger rail was heightened by last September’s terrorist attacks, which shut down airports nationwide for three days.
“After 9-11, we need a rail mode of transportation as a backup,” said Mr. Quinn, R-N.Y. “If something happens to our air system, we need rail to transport people, medical supplies, troops, who knows?”