NEWS
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Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215
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telephone (614) 728-4520
http://www.dot.state.oh.us/ohiorail/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Stu Nicholson
Date:
January 5, 2004
614) 644-0513
Christmas Air Travel Snags Show
We Need High Speed Passenger Rail
(An Op-Ed Column by ORDC Executive Director James
Seney)
(Columbus) – The nation’s air travelers got a hangover before they even celebrated this New Year. Tens of thousands of people jammed airports or, if they made it where they were going, arrived with no luggage. A colleague’s friend had a relative fly in from Seattle for the Christmas holidays and was forced to buy new clothes because his luggage remained in Seattle for the length of his five-day stay in Columbus. His bags were there at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport when he got back.
That same colleague has another friend who spent 48 hours at Reagan National Airport trying to get home for Christmas.
Many critics and media are slamming the airlines for the problem. I am not one of them.
The “problem” goes much deeper than airline employees not showing up for work, or mishandling luggage. What happened at the nation’s airports over the Christmas weekend demonstrates a national lack of multi-modal capacity and, in my opinion, that we have a fundamentally unbalanced transportation system that remains as vulnerable to every manner of shutdown as it was in the days after September 11, 2001. Whether it is a perceived or real work slowdown by airline employees or a pre-Christmas snow and ice storm in the Midwest, Ohio and the rest of the United States has no way to relieve the resulting congestion and delays.
How many of these stranded passengers could have found an alternate and fast way home if this nation had a decent national system of high speed passenger trains running in many of the same short-distance corridors where airports were slammed by flight delays and cancellations? Yes, we do have Amtrak. But Amtrak is itself handicapped, despite its best efforts. Historically underfunded, it cannot serve these markets because it is hamstrung by Congress from creating any new routes. It does not have the money to even increase capacity or service frequencies on the routes it already runs.
What I am talking about is the kind of train service we can find all over Europe and much of Asia: high speed passenger trains that efficiently and competitively cover distances of 300 to 500 miles. I am talking about trains that travel smoothly at 110 miles per hour and allow almost seamless connections from city to city and ... yes ... at major airports. We don’t have such a system now, but we should Why should the greatest industrial nation and center of commerce in the world not have a passenger rail system worthy of that title?
Ohio is among several states and groups of states that are now moving ahead with plans for this very kind of passenger rail system. But these plans lack the very thing that has helped this nation fund and develop an interstate highway and commercial aviation system that is second to none: a dedicated federal development program.
We have never had and still lack a comprehensive national transportation policy that includes the development and expansion of our railroad infrastructure, for both freight and passengers. Even after the chest pounding and promises in the wake of 9/11, we have a transportation system that is as unstable as a two-legged stool. Over three years later, we still have essentially the same delay-prone system, save for the added security measures that have actually added to those delays.
This is doing more than inconveniencing you, your Uncle Bob or Grandma during a holiday travel rush. The lack of a federal rail transportation policy is exposing a weakness in our overall transportation system that can seriously affect our economic future in both Ohio and the nation. We are facing predicted double-digit growth rates in overall freight traffic over the next twenty years. The American Association of Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) forecasts an almost 70% increase in freight traffic, which will especially and heavily impact our highways. As good as our highways are, they simply cannot handle that load alone. No one system can. But the whole system can be better managed if we invest in our rail infrastructure.
What we need now is action in Washington from both Congress and the Administration to develop and enact a rail transportation policy that helps balance our overall transportation system. Doing so will also enable us to develop high-speed passenger trains that can and will be there when demand, weather or whatever else slows or closes highways or airports.
Instead of envying the kind of passenger trains we see overseas, we should be building and running them... and then developing BETTER ONES. After all, we are Americans.
(The Ohio Rail Development Commission is an independent agency operating within the Ohio Department of Transportation. ORDC is responsible for economic development through the improvement and expansion of passenger and freight rail service, railroad grade crossing safety and rail travel & tourism issues. For more information about what ORDC does for Ohio, visit our website at http://www.dot.state.oh.us/ohiorail/ )