orulz wrote:That's my point - double stack freight to the port of Baltimore is a parochial issue, rather than a great matter of national interest. It doesn't make a difference, on a national scale, whether cargo comes in through Baltimore or Hampton Roads or Charleston or Savannah or New Jersey or Houston or Wilmington or wherever. We shouldn't be spending $2+ billion of extra federal money so that Baltimore can retain or increase its market share over other east coast ports. This is what happens when decisions are made based on politics rather than empirical cost effectiveness.
Can you substantiate this with some evidence? The Class I's are investing big in PoB access, and State of Maryland has well-defined self-interest in funding upgrades (more solidly justified than, say, some of the money the New England states are thinking of spending on deepwater dredging to catch a couple token PANMAX ships on flypaper). It's a little presumptuous that some detached executive decision can be made from above saying, "no, Maryland, we're overruling you on executive orders because Hampton Roads--and the jobs it ends up taking from Baltimore--is a better strategic port for the balance of the lower 48." Maryland's going to sell that to its voters...how again?...when the traffic is swimming around the general vicinity? Their port, their economy, their math that shows it's worth baking that consideration up-front into a tunnel designed to last 100 years. Like it or not, the U.S. is a 50-state union with separation of national vs. state powers. Short of having another Constitutional Convention to re-federalize the whole country, state-level interests matter and are an inseparable component of national initiatives. In times of better-functioning gov't as well as chaotically dysfunctional gov't.
Alon Levy's a great transpo blogger on many things, but he explicitly--it's right there in the "About" mission statement on his blog--sticks to a borderless analysis of passenger rail issues in order to boil down some complex math (he being an advanced mathematician by trade) into useful national comparisons. That's his specialty. It explicitly ignores local issues and political-structural issues such as local vs. state vs. national legislation sausage-making that shapes national rail projects (not just here, but also with worldwide comparisons) because it's too unwieldy to offer up useful analysis incorporating that whole kitchen sink. Other transpo bloggers of renown have their own parameters for doing the same, because they have to place limits to be able to write coherently at all. So keep that in mind; the gospel being preached by some leading voices is intentionally not covering the same spread. Just because that's being argued from a national perspective doesn't mean the local perspective is baseless. ALL politics is local, even on the Euro HSR systems that are the envy of the world.
This is a tunnel with a 100-year lifespan. The economics of freight rail and deepwater port shipping are changing a lot on a 20-year level, and the players have a vested interest in baking in provisions for the
unprojectable eras >20 years out with their major infrastructure investment decisions. It is not a parochial decision in the slightest to conclude up-front "if you build this tunnel with under-wire clearances that can take a 20'6" tall double-stack under electrification that may someday be increased to 25 kV...we won't ever have to debate the need for building or modifying a freight-only tunnel if the need gets so acute the Port's livelihood depends on it." For total cost-of-ownership over lifetime of the city's rail infrastructure, that's a big savings--not a boondoggle--to take future considerations into account up-front. That's what they're going for. And the local considerations do matter. For preventing another mushrooming boondoggle they just have to keep the contracting corruption from entering the picture, and the mission creep with non-associated builds apart from the tunnel from creeping into the picture. Levy hits that aspect dead-on in his writing about Gateway: it's not the tunnel, it's Penn South and the other associated lard in the whole Gateway package that are driving up project costs off-scale with what other countries are able to do for their money...and loading that initiative up with potentially unacceptable risk for further cost bloat. The tunnel itself, however, is pretty much the going-rate for the construction difficulty. And the Gateway tunnel will be built for Superliner-under-25 kV clearances that Penn can't currently take...but might in the 100-year lifespan of the thing. If the B&P replacement sticks to the script and is
only a tunnel, there is no reason why they can't cover all their bases for 100-year traffic without ending up with a boondoggle on their hands.
Future-proofing isn't something to sneer at. It's smart planning when the cost of doing it one-and-done is orders of magnitude less than shorting it...going "Oops" in 20 years...then having the endless debate about a specialty freight tunnel costing 30 or 40 times as much as baking the extra 4 feet of vertical clearance into the New B&P. All because they goofed on their projections for one stinking mile of co-mingled running underneath the city. Even a "borderless" national perspective is going to endlessly ridicule something so stupidly short-sighted as that. Scrutinize the efficiency of the build's execution, not its relatively straightforward intentions. All this national vs. local tug-of-war won't matter if they get 100 years of capacity considerations for a tunnel build that sticks to exactly the going rate for said tunnel build.