Opinion: Tennessee should get aboard high-speed rail

When the idea of an Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville high-speed train route was talked about publicly two years ago, proponents contended it should be given serious consideration, according to an editorial in the Nashville Tennessean. A $1-million feasibility study that had recently been conducted on the Nashville-to-Chattanooga leg showed the project to be doable, but that it would cost an estimated $5.4 billion in public and private dollars.

Now comes word that
Tennessee and Georgia’s departments of transportation have jointly applied for
$34 million in federal stimulus funding to develop high-speed rail service from
Atlanta to Chattanooga, Nashville and, eventually Louisville, Ky.

The Federal Railroad
Administration grants would allow the two states to continue environmental
planning and engineering for a high-speed link between Atlanta and Chattanooga,
Georgia Transportation Commissioner Vance C. Smith Jr. announced recently.

While critics probably will
say this is a waste of time and taxpayer money, officials working on the
project should continue moving forward with an idea that still is in its early
planning and evaluation stages.

"We need to have more
of a regional approach to connecting our transportation options, because the
current system is not going to be able to satisfy future needs,” Joe
Carpenter, assistant commissioner in charge of the Tennessee Department of
Transportation’s environment and planning division, says. "Looking down
the line, we need to position ourselves to have viable corridors that can
support more movement.”

In other states, that is
currently being done. According to the FRA, Virginia recently began a new
service to Washington from Charlottesville and Lynchburg that is showing 163 percent
more riders than projected. An additional train is being added from Washington
to Richmond.

Ridership is also reported
to be up 25 percent between St. Louis and Kansas City, seven percent between
New York and Chicago and 12 percent between St. Louis and Chicago. FRA also
said North Carolina’s rail system, which will become a high-speed corridor in
the near future, has reported 200 percent growth.

In the West, the Amtrak
Cascades route is showing record ridership between Seattle and Portland, and
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service has overtaken airlines for travel between
New York and Washington.

Growth in auto traffic in
China and India and the resulting increase in oil and gasoline costs provide a
bellwether showing how expanded rail service will be needed in the U.S. in the
future, Carpenter said.

"Our responsibility is
to help educate the public on what the implications will be if we had a
high-speed rail service from Atlanta to Chattanooga and on to Nashville. We can’t
sit back and do nothing.”

If we do nothing, Tennessee
stands a good chance of being left behind as other states move forward in their
different modes of transportation. And, as others have said, if we do nothing
toward integrating our modes of transportation, we will only see our highways
and airports become more congested than they are now.

Certainly, the idea of traveling
to Atlanta from Nashville in only 52 minutes by rail sounds great. But, as
Carpenter said, it is going to take much more evaluating and planning to be
sure that the idea is feasible and not a waste of taxpayer dollars. But if
Tennessee sits out the process entirely, it risks being unable to get aboard in
coming years, when the need for mass transit will be greatly increased.