Houston citizens used to say that the city was the place “where 17 railroads meet the sea.” Regional trains transported grain, cotton and many other products that fed the city’s growing economy. Decades later, the freight trains carry an even wider range of goods but as the city has grown, the space to expand rail freight services has been consumed by all kinds of development. Some of the city’s rail lines have been torn up, others are hemmed in by warehouses, housing, streets and all the other features of a modern urban environment. The Texas Transportation Institute estimates that regional train traffic delays 186,000 drivers every day and these delays are costing shipping companies millions of dollars every year.
The city’s transportation circulatory system is clogged by railroads that are essential for its growth and economic health, but ironically, traffic congestion from rail freight is constricting the city’s potential for economic growth.
“It’s costing us in our efficiency and in our environment,” said Jeff Moseley, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership. “It is an important strategic infrastructure upgrade that we must have if we are to be competitive in a global economy.”
Moving freight trains out of the city’s center is not an option as it would strangle the petrochemical industry so vital to the city’s economy. Freight trains carry dozens of different industrial chemicals and the plastic pellets used for a wide range of different products. Before the current recession reduced the amount of freight moving by rail, freight train traffic was growing by four or five percent a year and nearly 900 trains moved freight every day in Houston’s Ship Channel.
The recession has reduced Houston’s rail traffic problems a bit, but city leaders know that the respite will not last. The city’s population is expected to grow and the widening of the Panama Canal is expected to increase the amount of cargo entering Houston’s port beginning in 2014. Transportation officials expect rail freight to triple in the area by 2035, but know that alleviating the blockages in the current freight rail system will be difficult.
Rail freight companies are privately owned businesses, but they are seeking public help for the more expensive solutions to the current congestion, such as bridges to separate city streets from railroad tracks. In exchange for using tax dollars, they might consider sharing their tracks and rights-of-way with commuter trains. Since moving freight by railroad seems poised for a comeback here and elsewhere around the country, a public and private solution might pay off in a wide range of dividends now and for the future.
