I-81 Corridor Improvement Study Public Hearings Prepared Statement of David L. Foster, Chairman, RAIL Solution
Studying I-81 – In Context
The problem with capacity on I-81 is, and always has been, freight. There are too many trucks. If it were just cars, we would be fine with what we have. So any time someone complains about needing more lanes, it's because of the high density of truck traffic. It follows, therefore, that if one could do something about the through trucks, the gravity of the situation would be considerably ameliorated. Massive new highway construction could be avoided, or at the very least deferred, possibly for decades.
RAIL Solution got its start in 2003 faced with this identical situation. The STAR Solutions consortium, headed by Halliburton, moved to privatize I-81 across the 325 miles of western Virginia, double its size by adding truck-only lanes, and make it a tollroad. They called their concept the “concrete freightway”. Citizens up and down the Corridor found the idea abhorrent. Not just because of the tolls, but because the scenic beauty of the road would be at risk, resulting in an adverse impact on the vital tourism industry.
From the outset RAIL Solution had an uphill battle. It was not enough to be NIMBYs, and founder Rees Shearer was perceptive enough to realize we needed to propose an alternative. That was to upgrade the Norfolk Southern (NS) rail line running parallel to I-81 roughly 600 miles from Harrisburg, PA to Knoxville, TN, and put the heavy flow of through trucks on trains.
Halliburton was extremely well-connected politically, and strongly supported by the highway engineering and construction lobby. RAIL Solution and its allied groups in the Corridor had to undertake intense grassroots organizing, town by town, county by county, securing resolutions of support for a rail alternative. In the end, at the public hearings conducted by VDOT, 73% of those commenting were in favor of the rail alternative. Ultimately the STAR Solutions initiative failed when only a trickle of anticipated federal funding was forthcoming for the $13 billion project.
In 2006 RAIL Solution sponsored a bill, HB-1581, before the VA General Assembly that would study the maximum feasible truck diversion on I-81. It passed unanimously, but later encountered headwinds, being declared an unfunded mandate. Norfolk Southern came forward and offered to make an in-kind contribution by having its consultant Cambridge Systematics (CS) perform the analysis.
The result was unsatisfactory. Instead of following the scope of work carefully spelled out in the enabling legislation, CS and NS used the opportunity to advance the NS Crescent Corridor initiative, a multi-state upgrade of the NS rail route for its double-stack intermodal trains.
Throughout the course of the study, whenever a draft was available for comment, RAIL Solution zeroed in on how the unsatisfactory focus exclusively on this one alternative would prevent knowing what more could be feasibly diverted. In the final study report CS enumerated, but did not study or evaluate, other truck diversion concepts and possibilities, labeled Strategy #2 – Strategy #5, with potential to divert more trucks than the NS preferred option alone (Strategy #1).
SB-971 that passed in January, known as the I-81 Corridor Improvement Study, is a renewed window of opportunity to pick up where we left off with HB-1581. The final CS study document, entitled Feasibility Plan for Maximum Truck to Rail Diversion in Virginia’s I-81 Corridor, dated April 15, 2010, contains useful material and is a logical and essential starting point for the current study to begin its intermodal analysis. RAIL Solution can provide its detailed critique of the CS effort, including where and how it failed to determine maximum feasible truck diversion as HB-1581 intended. We also have a number of background and supporting documents related to that study that may be useful to the new study.
We tried but failed to have the SB-971's text modified in Committee to specify a multimodal scope. But Transportation Secretary Valentine has assured me that it will be a multimodal study. "The bill does not preclude it, so we will do it," she told me at a public hearing in Roanoke on May 10.
Railroad Intermodal – In Context
America’s railroads have done a fine job with double-stack intermodal. We can only imagine how much worse highway congestion would be today without it. But it is a mature concept and cannot do much to capitalize on the huge freight volume still moving by truck. Double-stack is limited by the enormous costs of the terminals, inherent loading and unloading delays, few origins and destinations, the feasible drayage radius, and capability to handle only containers and specially-equipped dry van trailers.
In October, 2006, then NS CEO Wick Moorman gave a well-crafted after-dinner talk in Roanoke, which he termed a coming out party for Norfolk Southern’s competitive strategy in the Interstate 81 corridor. I-81 comprises much of the western leg of what later became known as the NS Crescent Corridor.
What really distinguished Moorman’s speech that evening was not only his ability to relate rather complex transportation matters to ordinary citizens, but his candid recognition of the difficult challenges NS faced in gaining greater market share from trucks.
In unveiling the NS I-81 Corridor strategy he exhibited a broad appreciation of how rail competitiveness and successful diversion of through trucks would require an approach very different from the conventional railroad intermodal business model. He mentioned specifically that the I-81 market is highly fragmented; that it is mostly trucks (in contrast to the conventional container orientation of, say, the Chicago – New York market); that many are mom and pops; and that a prerequisite for capturing the I-81 truck traffic would be a more open intermodal strategy that can carry all kinds of trucks.
This recognition, coming from the head of a major Class I railroad, seemed promising. Yet later when NS established a website and PowerPoint presentation to encourage multi-state participation in its Crescent Corridor project, the focus was entirely on standard double-stack intermodal trains to begin in 2012. Open intermodal opportunities were pushed well into the future, with scant mention, for 2020 –2035.
To the best of our knowledge, NS has succeeded in running only one double-stack train each way daily except Sunday in the Crescent Corridor paralleling Interstate 81. These are trains #201 and #202, between Greencastle, PA and Memphis, TN. It is safe to say that this one train has had little perceptible impact on the heavy flow of truck traffic on I-81.
If railroading is to compete in any meaningful way, a more nimble and responsive intermodal strategy is needed to complement double-stack successes, one that can handle not just containers and certain dry van trailers, but all trucks, one that can make rail competitive in shorter-haul corridors of 500 – 600 miles.
The trucks have the business, so carry the trucks! This concept has various names, Truck Ferry, Land Ferry, and Rolling Highway. It is widely used in Europe by operators Hupac, RAlpin, Ökombi, and others, but has never been tried in North America.
Several advantages are immediately apparent. By partnering with trucks, no business is being taken away from the truckers. They keep all their customers and accounts, and, in turn, become the railroads’ customers. This means railroads don’t have to spend marketing effort visiting shippers and luring business away. A rail-truck partnership can result in each doing what it does best, with the trucks doing load origination and termination and railroads performing the linehaul. Truck ferry brings out the best of trucking and rail.
For many independent truckers (owner operators and fleet operators) the tractor, trailer, and driver are an inseparable unit, and nearly impossible to lure to conventional rail intermodal. But a drive-on, drive-off ferry move by rail can greatly enhance trucker productivity by keeping the truck moving while the driver sleeps instead of being parked at a roadside rest area or truckstop. If a truck ferry service were available at highway competitive speed, reliability, and cost, why would a trucker want to drive?
Unfortunately an open-intermodal, truck ferry operation on the NS route parallel to I-81 would be impossible today. The line is mostly single-track, much of it on alignments laid out in the latter part of the 19th Century. Substantial upgrading and expansion would be needed to achieve necessary speed and reliability. At peak times such as northbound on Sunday evening, the truck trains would need to operate on headways as little as 15 minutes. The current lack of rail capacity and reliability also makes it nearly impossible for this truck ferry type service to be undertaken. If such a service operator advertises 12-hour transit time on, for example, a 600-mile run, the railroad has to be able to do that, and do it consistently.
Fortunately, however, the right of way is there already. Addition of a second track can improve throughput as much as seven-fold, in as little as 20 feet. And the cost would likely be far less than Halliburton’s $13 billion cost to double the footprint of I-81, and that was almost 15 years ago! The concrete freightways concept would undoubtedly be far more expensive today.
The Freight Railroad Challenge
Freight railroads are privately owned. As a result they receive little public funding or attention. This has resulted in a lack of balance in transportation infrastructure investment, with the vast majority of public money going to support highways. Increased truck competition during the decades of the build-out of the Interstate Highway System has caused significant atrophy of the freight railroads. Employment, track miles, equipment, and facilities have all been significantly downsized to conform to reduced business levels. In each economic downturn more such disinvestment occurs, making the rail system network less and less capable of supporting future growth.
Efficient freight movement is vital to a vibrant economy. Because freight railroads are consistently overlooked by policymakers, their role, contribution, and capabilities have been increasingly marginalized. The current preoccupation with development of autonomous vehicle technology and self-driving trucks further threatens future rail viability, and platoons of driverless trucks portend further stress on highway capacity and delays to the driving public.
Movement of mid- to long-distance freight by rail offers compelling energy, environmental, and economic advantages that will be forfeited if a healthy freight rail system is lost. No longer is it economically practical or environmentally acceptable to address every problem of congestion and growth with more lanes of highway. Rail transport moves a ton-mile of freight with less than a third of the fuel required for trucking. Less fuel burned means less pollution generated and lower greenhouse gas impact. Railroad electrification can double this comparative advantage and greatly reduce our current near-100% dependence on oil in the transportation sector.
Where a need arises for expanded freight capability in a corridor, it may well be possible to achieve greater public benefit from investment in rail. Rigorous assessment of life-cycle costs and benefits should be required to weigh alternative investment in highway and in rail. Just because railroads are privately owned is no reason to deprive citizens of their optimal potential use if such investments can demonstrate better rates of return. Preserving a healthy and growing freight rail system can also postpone and mitigate future more costly and environmentally disruptive new capacity on our highways.
Public Involvement in Freight Rail
Freight rail is an awkward topic. If public policy tilts toward investment in freight rail infrastructure, there is the risk of criticism for enriching private industry executives and/or shareholders. If public policy ignores freight rail infrastructure, however, there is a risk that a viable freight movement alternative may be lost. Were that to be the case, much more future freight movement growth would have to be accommodated on highways, likely at much larger public cost than what would have been needed to upgrade and preserve the railroads.
Public policy needs a new awareness of the precarious state of the freight railroads now facing new threats from autonomous trucking, where billions of dollars of research and development funding are flowing.
Transportation professionals need to understand the thorny issues here and the rail alternative needs to be more prominent in public discussion and debate. It is too easy to overlook railroads altogether when exploring new freight movement capacity needs of a corridor. Public policy can be enhanced and taxpayer value maximized by rigorous life-cycle cost/benefit analysis of whether new capacity makes more sense on highway or rail. This exercise needs to include all economic and environmental costs and benefits.
Tolling Reconsidered
A key part of the SB-971 study is to evaluate tolling of trucks on I-81. Damage to pavement and bridges is overwhelmingly attributable to heavy trucks, yet historically there has been little attempt to recoup the costs of this differential impact. Tolling is the simplest, fairest, and most direct way to do so.
As mentioned above, earlier attempts by Halliburton to convert I-81 to a tollroad were widely opposed. In that case, however, cars would also have been tolled. Residents up and down the Corridor were energized to turn out at public hearings to speak in opposition. At least partly as a result of this groundswell, the General Assembly later passed a measure to prohibit tolling on I-81. That restriction, which we believe to be still in effect, would have to be changed if the SB-971 study concludes that truck tolls are recommended.
Possible benefits of truck tolling include recouping their disproportionate wear and tear impacts, as well as helping to restore a more competitive balance in the I-81 Corridor between rail and truck. Possible adverse effects include imposition of incremental transportation cost burdens on economic growth in one corridor alone, and diversion of trucks onto parallel State Route 11 and other secondary roads. The study will need to weigh these positive and negative impacts.
Conclusion
The most critical element at the hearings up and down the Corridor this summer, needs to be reinforcing an appreciation that the study rigorously analyze the life-cycle costs and benefits of adding new capacity on the highway vs. on rail, including both economic and environmental costs.
The Feasibility Plan for Maximum Truck to Rail Diversion in Virginia’s I-81 Corridor final report dated April 15, 2010 contains useful background and scoping information as a start point for this work. The new study has a chance to fulfill the original intent and promise of that effort left unfinished.
Public opinion solidly favors fewer trucks on I-81. Spreading them out on more lanes is a false fix. Tolling them can reduce the de facto public subsidy of trucking. But diverting a significant percent of the through trucks onto an upgraded railroad offers compelling advantages, representing a true fix that should not be overlooked.