More Trains Means More Trucks On Georgia’s Roads

Georgia needs to have a long and detailed conversation about trucks. Instead, we’re at least briefly distracted by trains.

There have been quite a few news stories in circulating in the last few weeks about Georgia “getting serious” about passenger rail. “They’re” talking about this in Chattanooga, Birmingham, Charlotte, and Savannah. “They” are looking at making Atlanta’s role as a rail hub great again. 

Who are “they”?

They are the consultants and transportation entities that received funding to study “high speed” rail corridors for passenger rail throughout the country from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. $8 million was appropriated from the federal government to study routes in Georgia with Atlanta as a hub city. Their reports are coming in, and not surprisingly they all give a full and unconditional green light to…another round of studies.

If you haven’t figured out where this track is headed, consider the weather. We didn’t need a round of weekend snow flurries mixed with rain to throw cold water on this story that has been recycled more times than Chattahoochee river water flowing south out of Atlanta.

We’ve seen these studies before. They’re almost always initiated with federal funding. They always suggest more studies. But the crucial element is that they’re always tied to funding for propping up existing rail service or funding bigger boondoggles elsewhere.

The same act that Georgia’s Senators brag about securing $8 million for us gave California another $3.1 Billion for their attempt at high speed rail construction. If California getting almost 400 times more money than Georgia seems unfair, consider that there is equality in the outcome. Both states will have zero new miles of track in operation because of these expenditures. 

Speed is an issue here, both for the trains and for the process in which the federal government “helps” move a project along by mandating endless studies that make actual construction impossible. Note that a law to facilitate this was passed five years ago. We’re just now seeing the first set of studies of many that would be required if the will and funding to build these rail lines actually existed.  

Environmental reviews alone, under federal requirements known as NEPA, can take a decade or longer. Construction of major infrastructure can somehow take even longer still. Note that the rebuild of the I-75/I-16 interchange in Macon has had its tenth birthday, and will likely be old enough for a driver’s license by the time it is completed.  

Then there’s the speed of the trains themselves. Advocates point to Europe and Japan as the model, with their Eurostars and bullet trains that can hit speeds of 200 miles per hour. While Amtrak’s DC to New York Acela train is now capable of reaching 160 mph, most of the track it operates on limits speeds between 105 and 110.  This is despite spending $2.5 billion over the past decade to upgrade the train which somehow now operates slower than the older model.

The track problems are even more of an issue in Georgia. In many of our urban areas the existing track has to contend with sharp curves that severely limit speeds. Fixing those would be expensive and messy. 

Eminent domain would have to be used extensively. In addition to taking land to straighten out curves, almost every existing corridor would have to be widened. Most of Georgia’s railroads are “single tracked”, with freight trains running one direction for a while, then pulling to a siding to wait while trains going the opposite direction get their turn. It’s a well-choreographed ballet that keeps freight moving with planning and patience. 

The result of this design is that a “high speed” freight train moves from Savannah to Atlanta in about 12 hours. A drive along I-16 and I-75 starts at about 3.5 hours, plus whatever time the drivers in Henry County decide to add for congestion. 

The expectation of passenger rail would be to make this trip faster, not slower. To accommodate this, new tracks would have to be added parallel to existing tracks, and trains would have to be able to bypass existing junctions and switchyards. 

All freight traffic would have to become a secondary priority to passenger trains. By definition, this would then make the movement of freight by train even slower. More logistics companies who need their goods to move to or from Georgia’s ports would then decide trucks are a better option than freight rail.

We started by saying we need to talk about trucks. Most of us like the idea of trains. They get a bit more questionable when we start to see the real costs vs the real benefits. But they become a real problem when we realize that for every car they take off our freeway, they’re likely to add several tractor trailers to our interstates. That seems to be lost in all of these self-perpetuating studies of trains that will likely never happen.