(The following article by Tony Hartzel was posted on the Dallas Morning News website on March 12.)
DALLAS, Texas — By the start of the next decade, some of North Texas’ worst traffic jams won’t just clog the interstates.
And they could cost motorists and businesses even more time and money than they do today.
Growing congestion on freight rail lines statewide threatens the economic vitality of Texas and its big cities, state leaders say. The clogged rails are pushing more shippers off the nation’s original highways of steel rail and onto the crowded interstates.
As problems mount, Texas leaders are considering devoting billions of dollars to moving the privately owned, congested rail lines away from urban areas and giving them more room to grow.
The Texas Department of Transportation wants to dedicate $100 million a year from yet-to-be-identified sources, giving it the ability to issue $1 billion in rail project bonds. Another possible solution could come with Texas’ push toward public-private partnerships, setting up relationships with the railroad companies.
Spending money to fix railroads is a marked departure from the state’s previous priorities, but state and local leaders are eyeing potential traffic benefits, particularly for urban areas.
State leaders have a ready answer for those wondering why Texas might spend money to help private railroad companies.
“We are focused on transportation,” said Texas Transportation Commission member Robert Nichols of Jacksonville. “Moving people and goods efficiently and effectively is our goal. It doesn’t say we have to do so by road.”
Public safety and public transit stand to benefit from the proposal. Removing freight trains from populated areas reduces the chance of toxic spills like the one that killed three people in San Antonio last year. And commuter trains would have room to run on congested main routes through downtown Dallas, the mid-cities and downtown Fort Worth.
“There is almost zero risk in this,” said Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson. “If we continue to do nothing, we’re going to be sucked into the commode of gridlock. We’re focused on what it’s going to be like in 10 years.”
Demographers predict that Texas’ population of 23 million people will increase by 5 million in the next decade and will double in 30 years, projections that have state leaders looking for ways to handle increased freight traffic.
Limiting shipments
In some cases, railroad gridlock already has arrived. Last summer, Union Pacific Railroad notified many of the rock quarries statewide that it would cut by 30 percent the amount of mined material it shipped.
“Right off the bat, we started to see where there was a severe shortage of material, particularly in Houston and South Texas,” said Michael Stewart, president of the Texas Aggregates and Concrete Association, which represents quarries and other businesses involved in supplying materials used to make concrete.
One Houston businessman quickly had to find trucking companies to deliver the equivalent of 20 rail cars of mined material every two weeks, Mr. Stewart said. Using state officials’ estimates, that equates to 60 to 80 tractor-trailer loads.
“These are the kind of desperate measures that those kinds of facilities have had to go to in order to meet their demand,” he said.
Making partnerships
The rail line initiative is one of the major platforms of the state and the Transportation Department’s legislative agenda this year. The state agency wants the Legislature to remove an annual $25 million spending cap on rail projects. The department also wants the ability to enter into public-private partnerships for complex rail projects, as it has done with the Trans-Texas Corridor.
The focus on railroad investment comes as the state enters a multibillion-dollar partnership with Spanish construction firm Cintra to build toll roads and rail lines from the Red River to the Rio Grande.
Major rail line construction probably would not occur until 2025 or later, leading the state to hold its own discussions for rail line improvements with Texas’ two major railroads, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The state expects to use the same model as the Trans-Texas Corridor concept.
“It’s probably going to take a public-private partnership,” said state Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Round Rock, chairman of the House Transportation Committee. “The solutions are going to cost billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars.”
With no deals in the works, the state does not have a firm idea of how much it might cost taxpayers. The goal of the 2005 legislative session will be to create a legal framework for rail line partnerships and probably find revenue sources in the next few years, Mr. Krusee said.
The rail relocation proposal has gotten the blessings of state leaders such as Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick.
“Talks have been going on, but there is nothing conclusive at this point,” said Mr. Perry’s press secretary, Kathy Walt. “The governor was the first to raise the issue of urban freight rail and moving them outside of the urban centers.”
An agreement with the railroads would be without precedent, said Mr. Williamson, the Transportation Commission chairman.
“No state has ever been able to get the two largest railroads to work together to agree on a common goal of building new lines and relocating existing rail lines,” he said.
Union Pacific and Burlington Northern are working with the state Transportation Department, spokesmen for both railroads say. The state and Union Pacific have traded preliminary proposals, but they require more work, spokesman Mark Davis said.
If the state relocates a rail line, Union Pacific would look to keep its trains on the same schedule. In North Texas, that would mean that a new, longer rail line must allow trains to travel at faster speeds than allowed in urban areas.
“Relocations tend to benefit the public vs. the railroad. Our requirement is that anyplace we move has to be at least as good as the current situation,” Mr. Davis said.
Oklahoma has been buying old rail lines and expanding the state-owned rail network for more than a decade. And other regions of the country have undertaken or are considering massive rail relocation projects. In Los Angeles, for example, a joint authority built the $2.4 billion, 20-mile Alameda Corridor project. It features a new trench that consolidated rail lines onto a single, high-speed line and eliminated an estimated 200 railroad crossings, which slowed both train and vehicle traffic.
Transportation officials in states such as Texas view the push toward rail lines as a way to ease the wear and tear on roads. A single 110-car freight train can take enough tractor-trailers off the road to prevent the damage done by 3 million to 4 million passenger vehicles, Mr. Nichols said.
“We are spending hundreds of millions to relieve congestion anyway in downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth,” Mr. Williamson said. “What if we can relieve congestion by spending hundreds of millions to build different kinds of roads?”
‘Seaport on land’
Every month, the need for rail capacity grows in North Texas.
On the southern edge of downtown Fort Worth, the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern rail lines meet. In a few years, the rail bottleneck area will not have enough room to handle the expected traffic.
“In seven years, they will be stacking trains here like they’re stacking ships off the port of Long Beach, [Calif.],” said Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments.
Relocating the rail lines at what is believed to be the biggest freight bottleneck west of the Mississippi River could cost $2 billion in North Texas alone. And while all major metropolitan areas larger than North Texas have the ability to expand shipping docks along the East and West coasts or one of the Great Lakes, leaders here must focus on improving the rail network to keep up with business demands, Mr. Morris said.
“We want to create the equivalent of a seaport on land,” he said. “Look at what D/FW Airport did for this area in the last century.”