I want to talk briefly about three things today–all of them related.

First, I want to talk about the terrible traffic congestion in the Chicago region, which is getting worse.

Second, I want to talk about the terrible air quality that congestion is causing (and it’s getting worse too).

And finally, I want to talk about how public investment in railroad-infrastructure improvements can alleviate some of the traffic problems–and even start our regional economy growing again.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

All of us have experienced this scene personally. We’ve been stuck in traffic. We’ve missed appointments. We’ve sat in our powerful cars feeling powerless.

But there’s more to this scene than the personal frustrations of each of those motorists. There are public consequences.

The Metropolitan Planning Council did a study in 2000 that showed that in five of the six northeastern Illinois counties, average commuting times had increased by more than 10 per cent since 1990.

MPC says that if we don’t change our transportation policies and provide better ways to get around, those delays will increase 25 per cent by 2030. Some studies say it’s going to be much worse than that.

Those numbers means more than frustration for motorists. They also mean bad news for our region’s economic growth–the number of new jobs and new business opportunities created in and around Chicago.It’s hard to grow a business in an area where people and goods don’t move fast enough.

It’s hard to hold good employees if the commute to work is too long or the employees arrive late.

It’s hard to run a factory when you can’t get your inbound raw materials on time. You have to invest extra money in warehouse space so you can stockpile what you need in case a truck doesn’t arrive on schedule.

It’s hard to keep your customers pleased if gridlocked expressways keep the truck from delivering your products on time.

Chicago isn’t doing as well in the economic-growth sweepstakes as it was a hundred years ago–or even 10 years ago. The development engine is sputtering as travel times get longer. The 2000 census showed that in five of the six counties, commute times increased by more than 10 per cent since 1990.

Those longer commute times are like the canary in the coal mine. If daily drive to work is 10 per cent longer than it was 10 years ago, it’s a pretty good bet that the average truck delivery is taking 10 per cent longer too. The cars and the trucks have to share the same highways.

The MPC study found out some other things as well. Drivers in the Chicago area spend the equivalent of almost three extra days per year in rush-hour gridlock.

That’s a lot of wasted personal time.

But it’s a public waste as well. While they’re stranded in traffic, their vehicles burn up an extra 104 gallons of gasoline a year and run up more than $1,200 dollars in extra fuel, maintenance and depreciation costs. The three wasted days will cause each of those cars to dump an extra 331 pounds of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.

People in this region now spend an average of 56 minutes per day in an automobile.

That’s the average for everybody in the Chicago region, remember: It includes all the people who aren’t using a car. So those who are using a car are actually spending much more than an hour per day on the road–sometimes two or three hours a day. Yet too much of that time is spent in a car that isn’t moving.

Did you know that the Environmental Protection Agency has placed the entire urban/suburban corridor from Green Bay, Wis., to South Bend, Indiana, in an Air Quality Non Compliance zone?

Every municipality in that strip along Lake Michigan is eligible for federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grants.

The Chicago region–which is the anchor of that whole strip, has ranked among the top ten most congested metropolitan regions in the U.S. for the last 20 years.

But as important as clean air is to all of us, the real impact of all this growth is on our region’s economic development, which already is beginning to show the strain caused by lack of mobility.

Mobility is key to economic development. If we want to have more business growth, new-business formation, more and better jobs paying larger salaries and benefits, sales taxes and real-estate tax collections to support the government programs we need–we’re going to have to have better transportation in the Chicago region.

Let me show you what I mean:

Here’s how the world moved for about 5,000 years. Animal power. From the start of organized commerce in Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago until nearly the fifth decade of the 19th century, this was about as fast as people and goods could move over land–five to seven miles and hour. The speed of a horse and wagon was the chief constraint on trade and economic development.

When General George Washington moved his army from New York to Philadelphia in 1776, the men and supplies moved no faster than Alexander the Great’s army was able to do when they left Macedonia and marched east to conquer the Persian Empire in 333 B.C.

When a Pennsylvania farmer in 1776 loaded up a wagon to sell a load of corn in Philadelphia, he didn’t deliver it any faster than an a Roman peasant did trying to sell his wheat to a Roman miller at the time of Christ.

The American history professor and railroad historian Albro P. Martin wrote in 1990:

“When the members of the First Congress traveled to the capital at New York in the spring of 1779 to begin the government under the new Constitution, they went by means which were no faster and no more comfortable than those by which the Roman senators had journeyed from their villas to Rome almost two thousand years before.”

For more than 2,000 between Greco-Roman times and the founding of America, there was no progress in overland transportation–and very little economic growth anywhere in the world.

What finally changed all that?

Thank you. It was the railroad. Or, I should say, the combination of iron railroad tracks with vehicles powered by steam running over them. Around 1825, some inventors in England began mounted one of James Watt’s steam engines on an iron-wheeled carriage and using it to pull loaded wagons with flanged steel wheels along a track.

It worked. Suddenly, people and goods were moving around Britain at 10, 15, even 30 miles and hour. The old horse-and-wagon speed barrier had been broken, and the Industrial Revolution was under way.

But people really didn’t grasp what railroads accomplish for economic growth until they spread to the United States. This country had much longer overland distances than any country in Europe. Those distances had to be crossed if America was to be developed.

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Until the coming of the railroad after about 1840, the United States didn’t really have a national economy–only a bunch of disconnected local economies that could not trade with one another.

At the time of the American Revolution it cost as much to ship a ton of goods 30 miles inland from the East Coast as it did to ship it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. There was no practical overland transportation for moving large volumes of goods quickly and cheaply between the Eastern Seaboard and the interior of the country. American development was stalled on the East Coast. Horse-and-wagon speeds cannot move a primitive economy into the lift-off stage.

But look what happened over the next 30 years. By 1869 America had railroad tracks connecting both coasts, and goods were moving across the American continent at speeds of 35-40 miles per hour–not twice as fast as in George Washington’s day, not three times as fast as in George Washington’s day–but seven or eight times faster than the standard draft-animal speed that had prevailed for 5,000 years.

That’s how the American economic and political miracle happened. Railroad technology plus a vast and varied geography unleashed a tidal wave of economic growth unlike anything the Old World had ever imagined. By 1914 the United States had eclipsed the British Empire to become the wealthiest nation in the world.

Never before had one people, under one national government, brought so vast a territory under control and integrated all of it into a single giant economy.

I wish I could report to you that we all lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, a century and a half after the railroads touched off a firestorm of economic growth by breaking that horse-and-wagon speed limit, we’re getting stuck again.

Do you know what the average truck speed is across the Chicago region?
It’s between 10 and 15 miles per hour. I got that number out of a report called Critical Cargo. It was published a year ago by Business Leaders for Transportation.

And that speed is dropping. Twenty years ago trucks didn’t take that long to work their way across Chicago. Now they’re creeping at the same rate as the commuters. No surprise there. The trucks and the cars share the same highways.

A truck speed of 10 to 15 miles per hour is not attractive to businesses looking for a plant or warehouse location.

How did this happen? Why isn’t our transportation system working as well as it did 30 or 40 years ago?

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Illinois Tollway about 1958–open road, plenty of space
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Here’s what the Illinois Tollway looked like when it opened in 1958.

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Illinois Tollway today, showing backup
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Here’s what the Illinois Tollway looks like today. What happened?

The short answer is something called “policy failure.” Our transportation planners have failed us by locking us into an unbalanced, unresponsive transportation system that forces us to over-rely on highways and makes it impossible for most of us–both shippers and travelers–to use railroad transportation effectively.

There are some historical reasons for this that we don’t have time to go into except to say that roughly 100 years ago Americans got very frustrated and upset with the railroad industry. It was monopolistic, and unresponsive. Most of the industry was run by ex-military men, and they ran it like an Army. “Customer-friendly was not in the business vocabulary of that time.

But rather than take steps to improve the railroad industry, Congress and the White House decided on a different solution: We would side-step the “railroad problem” by investing public money in non-railroad forms of transportation.

In 1916 Congress passed the first Federal Aid Highway bill, and the states started constructing a network of hard-surfaced roads.

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Photo of early two-lane highway under construction
(showing horse-drawn machinery, if possible)
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Photo of lock and dam under construction on Mississippi or Ohio in early days (May be available from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
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In 1919 Congress started funding improvements to convert our free-flowing rivers into Inland Waterways, with dams to control the water level, locks to help barge tows move up and down past the dams, and the Coast Guard to enforce safety rules.

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Photo of postwar airport being improved–DC-3s, DC-4s and other propeller-powered aircraft at terminal
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In 1946 Congress created the first Federal Airport Aid Program to help cities build commercial airports. Congress made $520 million available–a tremendous amount of money for its time–to be shared with the cities and counties on a 50/50 basis over a seven-year period.

The message to the American people was, “Don’t worry about the railroads. We’re going to give you something better than railroads. We’re going to give you roads, airports and waterways, and those facilities will meet every conceivable travel and shipping need you are likely to develop, now and far into the future.”

That was the big policy failure–the idea that a modern economy can thrive without strong rail transportation. The federal government was saying, “Don’t worry. Be happy. You’re gonna love these new roads.”

In fact, if you go into the Northwestern University Library you can find a master’s thesis written in the late ‘50s that said we could tear up all the railroad tracks coming into downtown Chicago because everybody who needed to get to work would be able to get there by car.

The student who researched that thesis said the new expressways would be so big and so fast and would handle traffic so efficiently that you’d never need trains again. He “proved” with mathematical formulas that it could be done. He was awarded his degree.

It was a fantasy, but it was a very appealing fantasy for many people at the time.

Government planners believed it. Many economists believed it. State, local and national political leaders believed it. The media believed it. Most Americans believed it. Everybody wanted to drive a car, and everybody wanted to believe that cars were the only transportation we would ever need.

There’s just one problem. It wasn’t true.

Today we know that a modern economy cannot grow and thrive without strong rail transportation. An economy that lacks a strong rail component thrashes about futilely like a swimmer trying to move forward with one arm bound to the side of his body. He needs all four limbs working together, not three strong limbs and one crippled.

Virtually all planners now understand and accept the need for a much stronger rail-transportation system as a major element in a balanced transportation system.

A balanced transportation system means not just that all four modes are present. It means that each mode–air, road, rail and water–is given enough resources to enable it to play its proper role. No more over-reliance on one mode, as we relied on rail between 1840 and 1906, and as we relied on highway after about 1930. Balance and proportion are what the planners are calling for now.

But the new thinking among planners has not yet translated itself into new public policies and new priorities.

Eighty-seven years after we got our first federal aid to the states for highway building, and 84 years after we got our first federally funded waterway improvements, and 57 years after the federal government first began providing 50/50 matching funds to the cities to build airports, we still do not have a federal program to help the states build additional capacity into the railroad systems.

And nowhere has this lack had a bigger impact than in Chicago.

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Map of principal North American main lines, color-coded to show the six large Class I carriers
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Why?

Because Chicago is where the main railroad routes converge and where the different rail carriers connect. It’s the only place in North America where the two big Western carriers, the two big Eastern carriers and the two Canadian railroads all meet. There are other points where two or three of those lines meet, but noplace else where you can exchange freight cars among all six.

Because of the way those tracks converge here, Chicago should be one of the best places in North America to establish a factory or a distribution center.

But that’s not happening the way it used to, because those tracks that meet here are not performing at their full potential. The network looks good on paper, but technologically it’s obsolete. It’s too congested to move freight cars into, out of and through the Chicago region with the promptness and reliability that shippers demand.

Because of that century of transportation policy failures I just told you about, the average speed of a freight car working its way across Chicago is between 6.8 and 12 miles an hour.

CATS’ own figures show a typical freight car coming off one of the Western railroads and switching to an Eastern or Canadian railroad takes about 48 hours to move through Chicago. Some take as long as 72 hours.

That’s because Chicago’s freight trackage has not been periodically updated with federally financed capacity, speed and safety improvements, as our highway and airport systems have.

If you look at a map of railroad lines, junctions and yards in the Chicago region, you see pretty much the configuration you saw in the 1920s. No mystery why it’s so slow: The railroads were too poor to invest in it properly, and government never bothered to. It’s technologically obsolete. It needs more tracks, it needs modern signals, and it needs viaducts and flyovers to lift the trains of one line over the trains of another line so they don’t block each other.

Unfortunately, that can’t be dismissed as “just a railroad problem.” It’s also a highway problem. When shippers get frustrated with poor railroad performance, they switch their shipments from train to truck in order to get more speed and reliability.

That tactic used to work, but now it’s boomeranged. Freight diverted from the railroads is choking Chicago’s street and highway system. CATS says the average truck speed across the Chicago region isn’t much better than the average freight-car speed–10 to15 miles an hour. Twenty years ago it was twice as fast.

What used to be dismissed as a “railroad problem” has now morphed into a highway problem. In fact, it’s become a total-transportation problem. By trying to fix the individual pieces of our transportation system instead of the whole system, we have ended up congesting the whole system.

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Photo of gridlocked Chicago expressway with freight train stopped next to it (B&OCT Altenheim Sub in middle of Eisenhower Expressway could work here, or Stevenson running parallel to BNSF and CN/IC)
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So next time you find yourself stuck in traffic, don’t assume you’re the victim of a “highway problem.” You may be the victim of Chicago’s railroad problem. Lack of capacity and lack of performance by Chicago’s railroad system is pushing extra freight movements onto the highway system.

Just to give you one very dramatic example, look at this finding from the Metropolitan Planning Commission’s Critical Cargo study: It’s a scandal.

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Chicago intermodal yard–containers being ramped by crane with Loop skyscrapers in background
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Every day more than 100 intermodal trains arrive and depart in Chicago. An intermodal train doesn’t carry your ordinary freight cars, like boxcars, tank cars, or hopper cars. It carries flat cars, and on the flat cars are highway semi-trailers or maritime containers–“boxes,” they call them-- that turn into a truck.

Shippers love these intermodal trains because they can carry highway freight over long distances faster and cheaper than having it hauled by a truck.

One of these intermodal trains can take 200 containers of imported merchandise from the Los Angeles docks to Chicago in two days and two nights.

It would take 200 trucks and 400 drivers driving day and night to get it here in the same time.
And the trucks would consume ten times as much fuel and produce 10 times as much air pollution as the train.

But with an intermodal train, you only use a truck to make the final delivery of the merchandise. After the train pulls to a stop in Chicago, a crane takes each container off and positions it on a chassis, and a highway tractor hooks on and delivers it to the local Wal-Mart or Sears or wherever the merchandise is going.

Intermodalism is the way of the future. This is the way the rail system and the highway system are supposed to work together, with each mode doing the job it does best.

But there’s just one problem: When intermodal freight is routed through Chicago–to a connecting railroad–some of it takes as long to get across Chicago as it did to get here from California–50 hours. If an intermodal train goes through Chicago intact–if it’s carrying, say, 200 boxes all going from Los Angeles to a single destination like New York–we can move that train from the Western Railroad to the Eastern Railroad in two or three hours.

But if that train has to be broken up–if some of the cars have to go Columbus and some of them have to be routed to Boston and some of them have to be routed to Philadelphia–the process starts to break down.

Each of those blocks of cars has to go to a different outbound yard for its trip to the East. Switching the cars from a Western railroad to a switching line and then to an Eastern railroad can take two days!

The shippers hate that. It means a Los Angeles-to-Philadelphia trip that should take four days is going to take six.

So do you know what the shippers do?

When their trailers or containers for the East Coast arrive in Chicago from California, they send a truck to the Western railroad’s intermodal ramp to pick up the container and drive it across Chicago to the Eastern railroad’s ramp. There it’s lifted aboard the Eastern railroad’s train and sent on its way–usually within 10 or 12 hours.

This is called the “rubber-tire” interchange: train-to-truck-and-back-to-train because Chicago’s network of freight railroads and junctions is too antiquated to move freight in and out of the city at the speeds modern industry requires..
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Can anybody guess how many times a day this is done in Chicago?

CATS says it’s being done with more than 3,500 trailers and containers every 24 hours.

For your information, a typical highway tractor with a 48-foot container in tow measures about 70 feet long. If you line up 3,500 of them bumper to bumper you will have a column of tractor-trailers measuring 4.1 miles long.

I call that “Four Miles of Futility.” Imagine the frustration of all the Chicago motorists being held up each day by those four miles of trucks just shuttling between railroads because the trains aren’t moving fast enough.

Actually, it’s more than four miles of futility. It’s more like eight. Even on a gridlocked expressway the trucks don’t actually touch bumpers. They’re strung out a little.

Now we know why there are so many trucks out there on our expressways. It’s not our highway problem. It’s our railroad problem. We don’t have to build any new highway capacity to service that demand. We have to add railroad tracks and associated rail-technology improvements–so those trucks can get off the highway and back on the railroad where they belong.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take four or five or eight miles of trucks off the streets and expressways of Chicago every day? Wouldn’t our motorists just love to use some of that new open space?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Rear end of intermodal container showing “U” reporting mark.
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Next time you’re stuck behind a truck in heavy traffic, check the reporting marks on the cargo door at the rear. If you see a four-letter code ending in the letter U, like this one, that mean’s it’s an intermodal container.

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Rear end of semi-trailer showing “Z” reporting mark
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If you see a four-letter code ending in Z, that means it’s an intermodal trailer–it goes on the flatcar wheels and all.

You see a great many of these inermodal trailers and containers on the Stevenson Expressway between Harlem Avenue and downtown Chicago, on the Dan Ryan between downtown and Harvey, and on South Harlem Avenue. Those are the arteries that connect the big intermodal ramps, and it’s no secret that they have some of the region’s worst congestion problems.

But the rubber-tire interchange is choking many other arterials as well. And even worse, every day, thousands and thousands of truck shipments congest our streets and expressways that have never been on an intermodal train at all.

Many of them could be–if the railroads had the track capacity, the speed, and the modern signaling systems to move them as speedily and promptly as the shippers demand.

Norfolk Southern and CSX have estimated that between them they could take some 2 million trucks a year off the highways between the Northeast and Atlanta.

But because of nearly 100 years of policy failure, our railroads do not have the resources to accommodate the growth that’s coming.

And it IS coming. And even under the best-case scenarios, our highways will not be able to handle it.

The CATS projection says that even if every single highway improvement in their plan is built, congestion will increase 80 per cent by 2020.

There is no way to head that meltdown off with highway improvements alone. No amount of concrete we could pour can add the transportation capacity and the mobility our region will require.

But rail can do the job. Rail is the only remaining transportation technology that still has the potential to grow its efficiency without expanding its footprint.

Why? Because rail is inherently efficient. Remember those 200 containers that travel from L.A. to Chicago on an intermodal train?

They need only about 16 feet of right-of-way to run on.

A modern Interstate highway requires about 120 feet, but it can handle only about one fifth as much traffic per hour as a railroad.

And most railroads own 100 feet of right of way, only about 30 feet of which has track on it. The railroads already own the property they need to lay additional tracks, to build flyovers and viaducts, to install high-tech signaling systems and to reconfigure their yards and intermodal ramps for more productivity.

Railroads can double or triple their output without demolishing anyone’s buildings or condemning large amounts of private property. And because of their 10-to1 fuel efficiency compared with trucks, they can ramp up their productivity without adding substantial pollution to the air.

Remember that old saying, “War is too important to be left to the generals?.”

Well, we’ve finally reached the point where railroads are too important to be left to the rail industry.

They need to become part of the public planning process.

And they need to be included in public funding.

In fact, even though we’re still awaiting major federal legislation that would create federal funding for railroad infrastructure improvements, we already have some legislation we can use.

It’s called the CMAQ program–Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality. Communities can qualify for these funds if they apply them to programs that will ease street and highway congestion and reduce pollution from internal-combustion vehicles.

And that’s exactly what happens when we fund railroad improvements. Trains move faster and carry more freight and passengers that used to move in cars and trucks.

The CMAQ legislation doesn’t have the word “railroad” in its title. But it can be used to improve railroad performance–because better railroad performance translates into less highway congestion and less air pollution–the objectives of the CMAQ program.

Let me close by reviewing what we’ve covered here.

I started out promising you that I would show you that our vehicular congestion problems, including our air-pollution problem, are linked to a little-known problem located outside the street-and-highway system–on the railroads.

I traced this railroad-infrastructure problem to a “policy failure”that began with the federal government nearly 100 years ago.

I have called upon today’s federal government to reverse that mistake and begin helping railroads build the infrastructure improvements they need to achieve higher productivity and the rest of us need to begin controlling our traffic congestion and air pollution

I hope I have succeeded in demonstrating that not every highway problem is a highway problem, and that highway problems sometimes are solved best by fixing the railroad infrastructure rather than the highway infrastructure.

But I understand if you still find this idea a little novel–and maybe a little strange.

So let me repeat something that a friend of mine told me once. It may help you understand the problem.

He said, “A transportation system without railroads is like a cuisine without onions: The layman may not know exactly what was left out, but he can tell something’s wrong.”

Thank you. I’ll be glad to answer your questions.