DC Velocity - October 2013

basictraining

ed $1.3 billion needed. When completed, the system would be handed off to a private operator.

THE CYNIC AWAKENS

We may have reached the “Really?” moment. When has any major project been completed at or near the projected cost? What would committing to this program expose us to, down the road and in perpetuity? Who really benefits from passenger rail access—Columbus, Chicago, or the economic powerhouses in between? Plymouth, Ind.?

Kenton, Ohio? Say what?

With multiple one-hour flights
daily on three major airlines (often
at very attractive fares), why is a
train with nine intermediate stops a
superior solution? How much less
expensive, faster, and more flexible
would it be than the four-hour trip
by car? Have the railroads not had
about all the loss they can stomach
with the Amtrak solution? Why
would they commit to building new
infrastructure for passenger service
when they’re already funding the
development of a profitable freight
infrastructure?

So far, Northeast Indiana has spent $100,000 on an initial study (with some of the money coming from Columbus). A $2 million environmental study will be required as a prelude to asking the federal government for assistance in funding a $10 million engineering plan. What universe are these people living in? Are the real winners here those conducting studies and the down-the-road private operator that will run the system once others have paid for its creation?

In essence, we, for a variety of reasons, are being pushed to turn back the hands of time and adopt technology and solutions that became outmoded decades ago, based on

Art van Bodegraven may be reached at (614) 336-0346 or avan@columbus.rr.com. You can read his blog at http://blogs.dcvelocity.com/the_art_of_art/. Kenneth B. Ackerman, president of The Ackerman Company, can be reached at (614) 488-3165 or ken@warehousing-forum.com. assumptions that don’t apply in our geography, are patently false, and/or no longer contribute to progress. Where might it all end?

Maybe we can save the environment, extend the useful life of the existing highway infrastructure, support organic food production with natural fertilizers, reduce collective stress levels, and enable a manufacturing renaissance by replacing automobiles with Amish buggies powered by single horses.

An administrator has been quoted as saying of the Columbus/Chicago line, “This actually could be profitable.” This is usually called “whistling in the dark.” Just imagine—investing $1.3 billion and who knows how much more on something that maybe, just maybe, could work.

THE CRUX OF THE MATTER

Here’s the real issue. We have no quarrel with passenger rail, per se. We would love to have genuinely useful rail options all over the place. But we struggle with the national approach to the challenge, which consists of hundreds of individual, specific, limited, uncoordinated, and incompatible proposals for bits and pieces of a national system.

If some entity could make an economic case for an integrated national system that would complement present highway and air systems and not either compete with them or provide redundant services, we could get behind that.

Until that day, we cannot see pouring money down a rat hole for someone’s pet project. In the logistics of people movement, we do not have the geography or culture that would make sensible use of a German, Dutch, English, French, or other European model. So, replicating one of those, even on a limited basis, is probably not a 21st century solution. And by the way, those systems and underlying infrastructures do virtually nothing for the genuine and serious need for a freight rail infrastructure that will be sustainable well into the future. ;