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Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry and President Trump's Tariffs Agenda. | |
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| Next panelists advocating for Congress to take greater interest in the rail industry and realize its critical role in the coordination of moving goods and people cross-country. | ||
| Coming up next, a discussion that explores the need for increased investment in railroad infrastructure. | ||
| This was hosted by the Environmental Energy Study Institute. | ||
| All right, Brendan, we're going to get started. | ||
| Welcome to our briefing today titled, proudly titled, Like Trains, Then Choose to Learn About Federal Rail Policy. | ||
| I'm Dan Brissett. | ||
| I'm the president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I'll be your conductor today as we move through the program. | ||
| I'd like to start with thanking or by thanking Representative Paul Tonko and his great staff and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for their help with the room today. | ||
| Environmental and Energy Study Institute, or ESI, we were founded by a bipartisan group of Congress, members of Congress, and since 1984, we have worked to provide information about environmental, energy, and climate change topics to policymakers and to the public. | ||
| That looks like this. | ||
| We do a lot of briefings. | ||
| Sometimes we do briefings about transportation policy, sometimes we do briefings about budget and appropriations. | ||
| Sometimes we do it about climate modeling and data. | ||
| We cover a lot of ground. | ||
| And everything we do is always available for free online at eesi.org. | ||
| If you'd like to visit us online and watch our videos, read our articles, check out our fact sheets, that's great. | ||
| But the one thing I recommend that you do is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. | ||
| It's a great way to keep up with everything we've got going on. | ||
| We do our best to ensure that our programming is timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. | ||
| We put a lot of thought into making sure our resources are always science-based and ready when congressional staff need the information. | ||
| And to this end, we've just launched a brand new resource called Rapid Readouts. | ||
| These are semi-regular, 30-ish-minute briefings online only, and they're all about trying to make sense of the news that's happening at a very quick clip these days. | ||
| It's a busy place to be. | ||
| There's lots of stuff flying around, and these rapid readouts are our way, one of our ways to help you all interpret. | ||
| The first one we did a few weeks ago was about the Energy Star program and how that program delivers multiple benefits to people of all walks of life. | ||
| And we have a next, our next installment is coming up on Friday, June 6th. | ||
| That's at noon. | ||
| And we will be talking about where we are in the budget reconciliation process. | ||
| And our guest will be Brookings expert Molly Reynolds, who will help us understand where things fit together. | ||
| You're going to want to tune into that. | ||
| It's really great. | ||
| And again, subscribing to climate change solutions is the best way to keep up. | ||
| You can also follow us on social media. | ||
| We're on Blue Sky and Instagram, in particular, at EESIOnline. | ||
| Are trains great? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Trains are great. | ||
| They're really cool. | ||
| They're fun. | ||
| If you have little kids, there's a special thrill of being caught in a train as it's crossing. | ||
| It's a tremendous technology. | ||
| We all could talk about how much we like it, but that's not what we're here today. | ||
| I'm going to resist the temptation to talk about how much I really like traveling on trains. | ||
| And instead, we are going to turn to our incredible panel. | ||
| They need as much time as possible to share their experience and expertise with you, and we have a truly incredible lineup. | ||
| So I'm going to limit my introduction to this, and that's to call back to something I said at our public transit and mobility briefing, and that is that transportation policy is all about choices. | ||
| Do we want a transportation system that makes it easier, faster, and cheaper for people to get around and to move goods from here to there? | ||
| Or would we rather have it be harder, slower, more expensive, and frankly, more frustrating and less efficient? | ||
| How we know how much we already benefit from our existing rail network, whether that's passenger rail or freight rail, imagine how much more we could benefit if we let this mode of transportation live up to its full potential. | ||
| And whether that happens is ultimately based on upcoming policy choices. | ||
| And I'm hopeful that today's presentations can help us get these conversations started. | ||
| Our next slide has a QR code and a link. | ||
| If you'd like to take our survey, if you're here in the room, that would be great. | ||
| If you're in our online audience or if you're watching on C-SPAN today, if you visit us online, we'd love to hear your feedback. | ||
| We'll also put this up at the end of the briefing. | ||
| If you have any thoughts, questions, ideas for future topics, please let us know. | ||
| We're going to take questions today. | ||
| For folks in our in-person audience, we'll have a microphone and you'll have an opportunity to speak up. | ||
| If you're in our online audience, follow us on social media at EESIOnline. | ||
| We'll be doing real-time coverage on Blue Sky and our Instagram story. | ||
| You can also send us an email, and the email address to use is ask, that's ask at EESI.org. | ||
| Send us in your questions and we'll do our best to get to those. | ||
| We have a special guest appearing with us or joining us today via video remarks, and that is Representative Valerie Fouchy. | ||
| Representative Fouchy represents the 4th District of North Carolina in the House of Representatives. | ||
| She was first elected in 2022 and is the first African American and the first woman in history to hold the seat. | ||
| Representative Fouchy serves on the aviation as well as the railroads, pipelines, and hazardous materials subcommittees of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. | ||
| She's also a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. | ||
| And before serving in Congress, Representative Foushee worked for more than two decades in public safety and has been a tireless advocate for education and opportunities for students. | ||
| Hello, I am Congresswoman Valerie Foushee, a federal representative for North Carolina's 4th Congressional District. | ||
| I regret that I am unable to be with you all in person today, but I am appreciative of the opportunity to bring virtual greetings. | ||
| Thank you to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for hosting today's briefing and for your commitment to clean transportation, resilient infrastructure, and climate action. | ||
| This important discussion on federal rail policy could not be more timely as Congress begins to discuss and develop legislation to reauthorize our nation's surface transportation programs. | ||
| As our country continues to face rising transportation emissions, aging infrastructure, and the growing urgency of climate change, rail offers one of our cleanest, clearest paths forward. | ||
| Our railways have long been a powerhouse in America's transportation system, moving millions of people and vast quantities of goods every day. | ||
| From cross-country freight lines to intercity passenger routes, our rail network is essential to keeping the economy running and communities connected. | ||
| As a member of the Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee, I am proud to represent a state that not only recognizes the promise of rail travel, but also truly values its potential to connect, grow, and sustain our communities. | ||
| Nearly a year and a half ago, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the largest federal grant award in the history of my home state of North Carolina, just shy of $1.1 billion to design and build the S-Line, a high-performance passenger rail line connecting Raleigh, North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia. | ||
| This faster and improved rail service will connect the passenger rail lines already in operation in North Carolina with the larger Northeast Rail corridor, including direct service to Washington, D.C. | ||
| The S-Line project and its federal grant award are an exciting continuation of a substantial passenger rail boom happening in North Carolina right now. | ||
| In fact, intercity rail in the state saw record-breaking ridership in 2024 for the third straight year with a 55% increase in ridership since 2019 prior to COVID. | ||
| The expansion of passenger rail is a boon for everyone living in or near these new service areas, regardless of your preferred method of transportation. | ||
| Having more people traveling by rail means less traffic on the roads, shorter commutes for those who do drive, less air pollution in our communities, less road degradation, and more job and economic opportunities. | ||
| And during the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization process, Congress has a tremendous opportunity to modernize our rail system, expand electrification, and invest in faster trains, expanded routes, and enhanced safety measures. | ||
| We are at the crossroads of a new era, one where rail can reduce our dependence on carbon-intensive modes of travel and freight, where infrastructure becomes a catalyst for public health, economic strength, and climate resilience. | ||
| So as you hear from experts and industry leaders today, think about what is possible, what is necessary, and what the next generation of American rail can and should be. | ||
| Thank you again for the opportunity to speak today, and I hope you enjoyed today's briefing. | ||
| Thank you, Dan O'Brien, for that. | ||
| Thank you, Representative Hushi, for joining us today via video remarks. | ||
| It's great to hear from you and wish you could be with us today, but we understand it's a recess day and you've got business back in your home state, home district. | ||
| That brings us to our panel, and we have a real great panel today. | ||
| Our first speaker is John Robert Smith. | ||
| John Robert is the chair of Transportation for America and a policy advisor for Smart Growth America, where he advises on strategy, capacity building, and national outreach. | ||
| Prior to this role, he served for 16 years as mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, and that's where Union Station is. | ||
| That's the signature project. | ||
| It's widely recognized as one of the best multimodal transportation centers in the country. | ||
| And he's also former chair of Amtrak's Board of Directors. | ||
| John Robert, thank you so much for joining us at our briefing today. | ||
| welcome you up to the lectern, and looking forward to your presentation. | ||
| Thank you, Dan, and thank all of you for joining us on this rainy afternoon in our nation's capital. | ||
| And it's my great pleasure to be accompanied by my grandson Hayden this afternoon. | ||
| I have four grandsons, and it is literally for them that I continue to do the work that I do. | ||
| Simply, I want Hayden to grow up in an America that's better connected than the one we live in today. | ||
| I want to do a little level setting about transportation funding. | ||
| There is no transportation system on the face of this planet that carries human beings and pays for itself fully out of the fare box. | ||
| None. | ||
| Certainly not our highway investment. | ||
| You may have an automobile that you own, but when you back out of the driveway, you're on infrastructure that's paid for by the rest of the American taxpayers. | ||
| We created the Highway Trust Fund funded by the gas tax, and that was going to build out and maintain our highways. | ||
| But in 2008, the trust fund became insolvent. | ||
| And since that time, it has been an ever-increasing infusion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund to keep it solvent. | ||
| As of this year, we've put in about $270 billion from the general fund into the highway account. | ||
| And if we continue spending it to this level on highways, in 2035, we will be over $600 billion net deficit in the Highway Trust Fund, absent the general fund. | ||
| Your aviation doesn't pay for itself. | ||
| If your airline ticket had to cover air traffic control system, TSA, build runways, build airports, your plane ticket would cost thousands of dollars. | ||
| And when we're envious of passenger rail as we see it in Europe and Asia, it's because those countries' national governments have invested heavily in the creation of the infrastructure to support that passenger rail. | ||
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And at one time in this country, most of our population was within easy access to passenger rail. | |
| Perhaps it was one train a day, perhaps three or even six round trips, as you see with those that are in red, but this is 1962. | ||
| But what we have lost between 1962 and 2005, you see the vast difference of hollowed out parts of our country where our citizens have relatively no access to passenger rail. | ||
| Yet most of our cities and towns in this country, large or small, owe rail connectivity in some way to either their creation or sustaining their vibrant economy. | ||
| Certainly that was true of my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi. | ||
| We were created to support two freight lines that crossed there and two passenger rail lines that became 26 passenger trains a day through Meridian. | ||
| This was our wonderful union station at the time, but we lost sight of what really made us special in our region, and this was what was left of that once grand station when I became the mayor of the city of Meridian. | ||
| Property values downtown had plummeted, downtown was dying, and sales tax revenue was greatly decreased. | ||
| I believed if we could harken back to the very thing that made us a viable place, our transportation connectivity, maybe we could restart life in the downtown. | ||
| And so, using transportation enhancement funds, which are federal dollars through your state DOT, we began to build the South's first multimodal transportation center. | ||
| Passenger rail, intercity bus, local transit, all in the middle of the downtown in a very walkable environment. | ||
| Yet, midway through construction, Amtrak informs me that they're cutting service south of Atlanta. | ||
| So, organizing the mayors from Atlanta to New Orleans, we came to Capitol Hill to talk to our delegations. | ||
| When we left, Senator Trent Lott, who is a junior senator from Mississippi, called Tom Downs, who was president of Amtrak at the time, and said, Tom, this is Trent. | ||
| I didn't know I cared about Amtrak, but apparently I do. | ||
| How do we get the mayor's train back? | ||
| Well, it wasn't the mayor's train, it was 500 mayors across the country in their connectivity. | ||
| We got that train back, and in 2005, the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act was introduced, the first effort to provide significant funding for passenger rail. | ||
| And it passed in 2008, led by Senator Trent Lott, conservative Republican from Mississippi, and Senator Frank Lautenberg, liberal Democrat from New Jersey, and Chairman Jim Oberstar from Minnesota. | ||
| Three different parts of the country, three different philosophies, probably on everything else, except their people needed to be served by passenger rail that looked entirely different in New Jersey than it did in Mississippi. | ||
| And this is the station that we ultimately built. | ||
| And this station, for every dollar we put into it, it has leveraged $197 in additional investment within that three-block area. | ||
| 197 to 1 is a pretty good return on your money. | ||
| You remember, Katrina came in and wiped out the Mississippi Gulf Coast, including the limited passenger rail that we had at the time. | ||
| CSX rebuilt the infrastructure in four months, but Amtrak didn't restart service. | ||
| So Senator Thad Cochran, Republican from Mississippi, and Senator Roger Wicker, Republican from Mississippi, came together and said, how do we get that train back to serve these communities that are fighting to recover from Katrina? | ||
| And so with great effort and with the work of the Southern Rail Commission, the FAST Act was put together. | ||
| The first time that the transportation authorization, including Amtrak, as well as highway and transit. | ||
| And two programs were created of note: Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Initiative, CRISI, some of you I'm sure are familiar with it. | ||
| It's called consolidated because Congress said no new programs. | ||
| So we consolidated existing programs and then embellished the heck out of it. | ||
| And this is how you provide infrastructure needed for not only shortline railroads, but also for passenger rail. | ||
| And then the Restoration and Enhancement Grant, which covers now six years of operating funds. | ||
| And the FAST Act was led by Senator Roger Wicker, Republican from Mississippi, Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat from Washington State, and Congressman Bill Schuster, who's headed the TNI committee for the House, Republican from Pennsylvania, different parts of the country, different philosophies, agreement on connecting their people. | ||
| And if you look at the other parts of our states we want to connect, from taking the Crescent that passes through Meridian, extending it to Dallas-Fort Worth, and then also connecting New Orleans to the capital of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and then on up to Shreveport. | ||
| How do you go about doing those? | ||
| Well, we needed programs, initiatives, and funding to make it happen. | ||
| We needed a federal partner. | ||
| And so in IIJA, you can find those partnerships. | ||
| The CARDA Identification and Development Program, 69 new CARDAs. | ||
| Yes, only a handful will fully make, but one of those will be connecting Atlanta through to Dallas-Fort Worth. | ||
| And then the interstate rail compacts, which were based on the Southern Rail Commission, oldest such commission in the country, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, to create 10 of those across the country. | ||
| And with 10 commissions, you're going to have roughly 60 senators caring about that initiative. | ||
| And with 60 senators, you can do business. | ||
| And the IIJA, again, Senator Cantwell was now chair, and Senator Wicker was ranking member, and of course, Chairman DeFazio from Oregon. | ||
| Again, three parts of the country, three diverse visions, one goal in common. | ||
| Here are the 69 CARDAs that you see. | ||
| Here is the study of expanding the long-distance system. | ||
| And when you overlay the CARDARs, these possible expansions of long-distance and the existing system we have, now you're getting back to that map I showed you earlier where our people, wherever they live, are in reasonable access to passenger rail for the country. | ||
| And it's not just Mississippi. | ||
| It's places like Denver, Colorado. | ||
| This station leveraged $3.5 billion in additional investment in Denver and returns $2 billion a year in net revenue. | ||
| Normal, Illinois, bustling on a passenger rail that'll do over 100 miles an hour. | ||
| State-supported trains like the Downeaster through Maine and long-distance trains like the Empire Builder through the Northwest all connect people to promise and possibility. | ||
| What's limiting us now? | ||
| Well, the fact that Amtrak can't begin to provide all of the connectivity that is being sought by regions across the country. | ||
| We need other providers. | ||
| We need a little healthy competition for Amtrak as well. | ||
| And we need equipment. | ||
| Amtrak is almost out of equipment now. | ||
| They're finding it hard to run the service they have, much less any additional service. | ||
| So the Surface Transportation Board created the Passenger Rail Advisory Committee. | ||
| You can see who's represented, freight, shortline, states, advocates to bring back solutions for what the STB can do and what should be recommended for change. | ||
| And with two things, I'll wrap up. | ||
| We need to incentivize other providers, and there are other providers who want to offer passenger rail, but they need the indemnification and the liability coverage that Amtrak enjoys, and they need access to equipment. | ||
| So, a national equipment poo paid for by the taxpayers of the United States should be owned by those taxpayers, not any one provider, and should be available to those other providers that want to run that service. | ||
| And if you talk about an administration that wants to create manufacturing and jobs in this country, what better way to do it than building a passenger rail and passenger equipment industry in this country to meet the need? | ||
| Thank you so much, John Robert. | ||
| That was an excellent presentation. | ||
| And you were chair, but not chair of that committee that you just showed the members of. | ||
| You were chair of Amtrak. | ||
| Australia. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| But you're a member of that other committee. | ||
| I saw your name listed there on the right-hand side. | ||
| Next up is Elaine Nessel. | ||
| Elaine is the executive director of the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors. | ||
| CAGIT was founded in 2001 and is dedicated to the expansion and modernization of America's freight and goods movement infrastructure. | ||
| Its members include leading transportation associations, major ports, trade corridors, state and local government agencies, and individual rail, trucking, and engineering companies. | ||
| Elaine previously served as the coalition's director of operations and advocacy. | ||
| She's also worked for an aviation design firm and is a journalist for a local outlet in New York State. | ||
| Elaine, welcome to our briefing today. | ||
| I'll turn it over to you. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| All right, good afternoon. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| I'm delighted to be here to talk about my favorite topic, which is freight transportation. | ||
| To begin, I'm going to show that is intended to be illustrative of who the members are within our organization. | ||
| It is not exhaustive, but it gives you just a snapshot into who our members are to help to give a little bit of character to our positions and how we approach these important policy discussions. | ||
| So as noted in the introduction, we have many seaports, engineering firms, MPOs, large cities, shortline rail, and also freight equipment suppliers such as the manufacturers of rail cars and chassis. | ||
| And so all of these different agencies come together with the recognition that we need to be raising the profile of freight and goods movement at the national level. | ||
| And so I am going to be talking about rail policy, but I do think that it's important to think of rail policy through the lens of a multimodal perspective because we do not have railroads that pull up behind our big box stores or to our front door. | ||
| All of the different system modes need to work together in order to move freight to its ultimate destination. | ||
| So CAGIT has been around almost 25 years. | ||
| Next year will be our 25th anniversary. | ||
| And I say that in the context of the very first principle, which is raise understanding of freight movement and system investment needs, because that used to be how we spent a great deal of our time until COVID. | ||
| And all of a sudden, people began thinking about how they could not get their everyday essentials delivered to their house. | ||
| They were not showing up on the shelves at their stores, etc. | ||
| And there was all of the sudden an interest in learning about how freight moves around the United States, arrives in the United States, and leaves the United States. | ||
| And so the COVID supply chain crisis certainly elevated that level of understanding. | ||
| But of course, as anyone in this room knows who spends time up on Capitol Hill, we constantly have new faces arriving, and so we constantly have education to be done. | ||
| I recently heard a statistic that one-third of the members of Congress seated right now were not in Congress when the IIJA was passed. | ||
| Another third, the IIJA, was their very first surface transportation reauthorization. | ||
| And then the remaining third has been around for previous iterations of the surface transportation bill. | ||
| But I think that that sheds a lot of light into how important it is to continue this education effort. | ||
| So our big push within CAGAT has been to increase federal funding dedicated to freight infrastructure across all modes. | ||
| One thing that I would really like to beat back is that we stop calling it the highway bill as we talk about surface transportation authorizations because we're not just talking about highways. | ||
| We are talking about all the modes working together. | ||
| That includes rail. | ||
| And there are an awful lot of improvements that the federal government can be making to make our interactions with the rail networks safer and smoother. | ||
| And we'll get to that in a minute. | ||
| And then the final big principle that we believe is important is to improve the policy and planning supporting freight movement because for many, many years we had all of these different siloed efforts. | ||
| Of course, we have railroads and they are one very important silo to moving freight across the country. | ||
| And then there's highways and then there are ports and terminals. | ||
| And there just historically has not been enough interaction and all of these pieces again need to work together in order to move freight efficiently. | ||
| And oftentimes it's where those modes meet that we have the largest friction points in the system and where we really do need a federal partnership and approach to making sure that goods can move smoothly. | ||
| So this slide is just unbelievable because this is the number of programs that were authorized under the IIJA that is dedicated or available to freight rail improvements. | ||
| And I, of course, want to pause and say that when we're talking about freight railroads, the Class 1 freight railroads that operate in the United States are private companies that own and invest in all of their own infrastructure. | ||
| Period. | ||
| There are also shortline railroads, which John Robert hit on earlier when he was talking about the CRISI program, which is available to shortline railroads. | ||
| Those are oftentimes, almost always exclusively, also private companies that also own their own infrastructure, but they're much smaller. | ||
| Some of them can just be a few miles long, others are hundreds of miles long. | ||
| They vary a great deal in terms of their revenue portfolio and their ability to make investments that enhance safety and capacity, but they serve critical markets. | ||
| And what you see quite often is that these short-line railroads serve markets and rural parts of the country that often are not serviced by the Class 1 railroads. | ||
| And so they are the linkages to those Class 1 railroads. | ||
| And they provide a very important service for shippers. | ||
| So as we look down this list and we see all of these different programs that are available to freight railroads, again, like I said, it's astounding relative to where we have been in the past when we were still trying to increase the awareness of the types of programs and projects that are needed that extend just beyond highways. | ||
| And I think that there are a handful of projects that have been accomplished across the country that really show the excellent partnership and improvements that can be made when the federal government works together with regions and localities and railroads. | ||
| One of what I think is the best examples, frankly, is the Alameda Corridor. | ||
| If you're not familiar with that project, it was completed about 20 years ago. | ||
| It's in Los Angeles, California, and it carries all I think about 30% of the freight rail traffic leaving the ports of LA and Long Beach through what is called a rail trench. | ||
| And it's really remarkable because prior to this rail trench, which is buried, rail cars were leaving the ports and communities were separated by these class one rail lines. | ||
| And so if you were waiting for an ambulance and the hospital was on one side of the rail line and you were on the other side, you might be waiting a really long time for that ambulance to get to you because it has to stop and wait for the rail lines to go by. | ||
| And so this public-private partnership, the Alameda Corridor East, buried the rail line and allows the rail cars to move at 40 miles per hour through Los Angeles, which is an incredibly congested urban area. | ||
| And so as we, like I said, that project was done 20 years ago and then it continues to extend east. | ||
| And now there is a COG, the San Gabriel Valley COG, which is now undertaking something called the Alameda Corridor East, which continues to work on rail separation projects and safety improvements because we really do need to be able to foster positive relationships with the communities that are most impacted by freight movement, regardless of what mode you're traveling. | ||
| But rail is an important piece of that. | ||
| And so a partnership with the local community and the federal government to make sure that we are minimizing the impact of nationally significant freight movement is really key. | ||
| Another behemoth of a project that often comes up because it still requires a great deal of funding is the Chicago CREATE program. | ||
| All of the Class 1 railroads meet in Chicago. | ||
| And you know what else is in Chicago? | ||
| A lot of people. | ||
| And a lot of people that rely on passenger rail and people who drive their own cars and automobiles through the city. | ||
| And we need to be able to move people and freight because we are so often occupying the exact same spaces. | ||
| And so the city of Chicago has worked with all of the Class 1 railroads and the regional rails there in the city to develop the CREATE program, which is a series of great separation projects and projects to disentangle the passenger and freight railroads so that people and freight can move safely, effectively, and efficiently. | ||
| So I thought it would be helpful to give a couple of examples because you look down this list and they're just, I don't know, $3 billion here, $8 billion there. | ||
| But they really do go to programs that are important to our communities so that freight, rail, and people can live in harmony. | ||
| Because as you and I know, we depend so much on these essential freight services to get our consumer goods delivered to our door. | ||
| I'm going to wrap up there. | ||
| I know that I'm close to time. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you, Elaine. | ||
| Just a reminder: we will be taking questions from folks in the room. | ||
| So if you're thinking of your questions, and Sean, I see you here in the front. | ||
| I remember you from a couple briefings ago. | ||
| If you have questions, we'll come around with a microphone. | ||
| Also, presentation materials. | ||
| There are printed presentations for all of our speakers on the front table. | ||
| You can also access those online at eesi.org. | ||
| So just reminder. | ||
| And now I know what shortline railroad is in the monopoly game. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| I figured it was just called shortline, but it's actually a thing. | ||
| No. | ||
| But that was, I mean, I saw your slides yesterday, so I knew what you were going to talk about. | ||
| But I thought that was interesting. | ||
| When you said that, I was like, oh, yeah, I always wondered about that. | ||
| I mean, reading railroad, I know that, LeVar Burton, that's an easy one. | ||
| But great. | ||
| Our next presenter is Sean Jeans Gale. | ||
| Sean works as Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs for Rail Passengers Association. | ||
| Sean joined the association in 2008 as Director of Communications, and he's worked in the rail industry directing national grassroots advocacy campaigns and serving as a spokesperson for transit and passenger rail. | ||
| In addition to overseeing federal policy, Sean is in charge of the Rail Passenger Association's field organizing team, which supports passenger-centric legislation and voter initiatives at the state and municipal level. | ||
| Sean, thank you so much for joining us today. | ||
| I'll invite you up to the lectern. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| I want to thank the EESI for hosting this event, my co-panelists for doing all the heavy lifting. | ||
| And I'm going to try to iterate off of their presentations since there's a lot to cover and not a lot of time to cover it in. | ||
| So you might see me idioting myself on the fly. | ||
| And yeah, so I work for the Rail Passengers Association doing federal affairs. | ||
| We represent the users of the network, the existing network, but also people who are advocating for expanded service to their community because it's not connected. | ||
| And there's far too many of those cities around the U.S. | ||
| So today I'm going to try to cover what our association is focusing on during this reauthorization cycle. | ||
| It will be across three broad categories: which is the reauthorization of core rail programs, the implementation of the Federal Railroad Administration's Amtrak Daily Long Distance Service Study, which was teed up at the IIJA, and how we can build faster through planning, construction, and procurement policy reforms. | ||
| So, the first point I'll make is: you know, there needs to be a rail title within the Surface Transportation Bill. | ||
| You know, I think John Robert and Elaine both made that case very well, so I won't repeat it. | ||
| I will say one thing, which is that passenger rail solves a geometry problem that other modes can't. | ||
| This is a point made by Jarrett Walker, who's a transportation planner. | ||
| I think what he means is we cannot wait for technology to try to save us from the need to build these corridors because a two-track railroad can move as many people each hour as a 16-lane highway. | ||
| And so, when you think about cities, when you think about trying to move a lot of people along a constrained corridor, electric vehicles aren't going to solve that. | ||
| Waymo isn't going to solve that. | ||
| And Uber reinventing the bus every four to five years isn't going to solve that. | ||
| So, it's something we need to tackle. | ||
| That's a good news, bad news situation because it means you always get another bite at the apple. | ||
| It's a bad news situation because we're not very good at building passenger rail in this country yet. | ||
| And if you go through enough reauthorization cycles, it can start to feel a little sisufficient. | ||
| So, I think this is my third one. | ||
| So, hopefully, I think we did a lot of good work with IAJA. | ||
| I think we can do better next time around. | ||
| I will say, John Robert already covered the kind of general funds picture. | ||
| Highways don't cover their own costs through the gas tax. | ||
| They're not going to. | ||
| No one thinks we're going to raise the gas tax. | ||
| And so, to the extent that that continues to be the case, passenger rail ought to be a beneficiary of general fund transfers. | ||
| I think the IIJA came with a pretty good framework of two-thirds guaranteed advanced appropriations, along with one-third authorized funding. | ||
| We also think that formula distribution is something that Congress should look out, look at during the reauthorization. | ||
| I think right now we tend to over-rely on discretionary rail grants in the rail program. | ||
| Those are very hard and costly to administer at the state and local level. | ||
| You have to wait for the no-foe, staff up, apply for the grants. | ||
| There's a local match required, so often means going to your state legislature and trying to find that local money. | ||
| And then you submit the FRA, and eight or nine or ten months pass, and you get white or black smoke at the end of that little conclave. | ||
| And because it's oversubscribed, most of the time the answer is no. | ||
| Try again next year. | ||
| And so, what do you do with the personnel and the staff you just hired at the rail authority, at the DOT? | ||
| Does the state legislature claw that money back and use it for other purposes? | ||
| Are they on a two or three or four year meeting cycle at the state level? | ||
| And so, if you had formula funds, I think states and local government could invest with a little bit more confidence and really build that administrative capacity. | ||
| Also, I think the FRA, there's a role for the FRA to pay a stronger role in planning through repeated regional rail studies and planning cycles. | ||
| I think it would be redundant and inefficient to try to create that planning capacity 50 times across state DOTs. | ||
| I don't think we have enough people who know how to do that, who specialize in the rail industry in the U.S. to be able to do that. | ||
| So, we would like to have the states be able to come to the FRA and say, here's the core we want, help us do the planning work, rather than trying to go through the no-foe process, come back after having talked with consultants, and then get the yes, simply a yes or no from the FRA. | ||
| I know that's a hard case to make since the Transportation Secretary just fired a lot of the people the FRA had hired up in response to the IAJA, but nevertheless. | ||
| John Robert talked about the FRA's long-distance service study. | ||
| I will just say that study did a lot of good work. | ||
| They talked to over 50,000 American everyday Americans, hundreds of local governments, dozens of states, us, labor, class one railroads, and they produced a pretty good blueprint of a plan that would bring 40 million Americans onto the inner city passenger rail network. | ||
| What they did not do was identify a concrete next step. | ||
| And we don't want this study, which took a lot of time, a lot of political capital, a little bit of money to complete to just be put on a shelf and mothballed. | ||
| So, we think Congress should really create a National Long Distance Rail Service Commission to take the next step. | ||
| I think you could do that for a few million dollars a year in administrative operating costs. | ||
| Obviously, it will take a lot more money to actually build out the network, but you're not going to do it all at once. | ||
| And so, I think it's important to create the governance structure. | ||
| There's models. | ||
| The Gulf Coast Working Group would be one of them, and they just successfully brought back a segment that was knocked out Hurricane Katrina in 2005. | ||
| And so, there needs to be something like that at the national level. | ||
| Moving on to streamlining. | ||
| I think people have a pretty good sense right now that it just takes too long to build in this country. | ||
| I think everyone's probably been exposed to the Ezra Klein media blitz following the release of his book. | ||
| I think people have a sense a lot in the policy world about the problems. | ||
| There's a little less of a cohesive take on what the solutions are. | ||
| But we have some ideas, and I just, you know, when you look at the status quo, it's just not good enough. | ||
| It's not going to achieve what we need to do in the time we need to do it in. | ||
| Climate change means there is a deadline here that we need to achieve, that we need to hit. | ||
| And when you look at just one example, the FRA's long-distance service study, it assumes for each route four years for project planning and another four years of project development. | ||
| And so that's for a single train today that is definitionally operating over an existing freight rail line. | ||
| That's not good enough. | ||
| So we have worked with the U.S. High Speed Rail Association and the Teamsters to look at how you could implement a shot clock for environmental impact statements and environmental assessments. | ||
| You could have resource to binding enforcement mechanisms. | ||
| This is something that we do a lot at the state level when there's an infrastructure catastrophe. | ||
| We saw it in Pennsylvania with, I think it was I-95 and there's the fire and they just instituted a shot clock and move quickly. | ||
| And if it's good enough for a freeway, we think it should be good enough for a passenger rail line. | ||
| There are also 22 existing categorical exclusions right now within the FRA's within the FRA's portfolio and therefore projects that do not involve significant environmental impacts and are subject to expedited review. | ||
| I do not believe that those existing CEs are used to their fullest right now. | ||
| Something that's going to be hard to change at the congressional level because a lot of that is cultural and really a focus on process rather than outcome. | ||
| But I do think there are nudges that Congress can make in this reauthorization to move that along. | ||
| There's also a rolling stock bottleneck and I have one minute left so I want to wrap up here quickly. | ||
| A national equipment pool I will just add that private sector has invested a lot of money in the original equipment manufacturing rail supply sector to build domestic supply chains to build their plants out. | ||
| There's an expansion in North Carolina through Siemens. | ||
| There's an expansion in upstate New York just this week with Alstom and so we need to make sure that there is that next order so that that supply chain does not collapse and so I will wrap it up there so we have time for questions. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Sean, I will return this to you. | ||
| A quick follow-up and this is one that I think several of you mentioned. | ||
| You mentioned like an equipment pool building a supply chain for trains. | ||
| I think that's really interesting. | ||
| Could you explain a little bit about what that actually looks like in practice? | ||
| Like are there when you when you say that could you just describe a little bit more about what that looks like? | ||
| Is that like rail yards like you would go pick out train cars like you would in an auto dealership? | ||
| Is it onshoring or reshoring manufacturing facilities? | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think there's an industry-wide consensus on what it would look like. | ||
| There was the next generation equipment committee that was included as part of PRIA that involved the FRA convening a group of states in Amtrak. | ||
| I think there's room for a stronger federal role. | ||
| Inevitably, I believe Amtrak would be part of managing the actual physical equipment. | ||
| But what needs to happen is there needs to be a way to open it up to other operators, which is something that I think John Robert did touch on, because this is something that we want to introduce a little competitiveness into the system. | ||
| But a lot of how it looks depends on how much money is provided. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But I think the goal would be to build on existing manufacturing lines of trains currently being manufactured right now, so you don't have to start from scratch. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| John Robert, if you have anything you'd like to add, please feel free. | ||
| Well, we need to standardize the passenger equipment we have in the country. | ||
| Right now, we're building boutique sets of equipment depending on where they run. | ||
| Industry can't scale up when you do that. | ||
| We need standardized equipment. | ||
| The FRA has already approved, so we know it'll operate in this country. | ||
| We have new Acela assets that have been in the country for three and a half years that are not running yet because they can't pass the modeling requirements in this country in order to run. | ||
| I'm hoping that will run by the end of this summer. | ||
| Amtrak literally does not have sufficient equipment to run all of the service they have with any backup whatsoever. | ||
| And we're pleased that they have cobbled together enough equipment to run the Mardi Gras service, which will be the name of the service from New Orleans to Mobile, which should start end of July or early August. | ||
| They just lost 80 of their Horizon car fleet, so that's effectively out. | ||
| They can't begin to look at expanding. | ||
| That's why we need an industry to grow here. | ||
| I was on the board when we rolled out Acela for the first time, and we had to pull it because of an undercarriage problem. | ||
| And I was with David Gunn, who was president of Amtrak, and we were visiting with Arlen Spector. | ||
| Now, you don't remember Arlen Specter, but he was called Snarlin Arlen for a reason. | ||
| And we were visiting with the senator, and the senator said, Well, just go buy more parts. | ||
| And David said, and David was equally blunt, said, You know, Senator, I don't go to Pep Boys to buy parts for my trains. | ||
| We don't have the manufacturing and the supply base for the parts we need to keep the equipment we have running, much less to build out a robust industry. | ||
| And I think it's a wonderful opportunity for the country. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Well, thanks for that. | ||
| I've seen some of those new next generation of Acela, they look great. | ||
| Elaine, I want to give you an opportunity to comment on supply chain too since Sean and Robert. | ||
| Is there a similar issue that you have on the freight side? | ||
| I think that on the freight side, it's incredibly complicated. | ||
| You could get your PhD in all of the different pulling equipment arrangements. | ||
| And by the time you finished it, it would be useless because they would have shifted based on the private sector and things like that. | ||
| So that's just constantly happening. | ||
| That would make it very complicated for it. | ||
| Great, thanks. | ||
| Yes, that's all right. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I apologize for that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Thank you very much for that. | ||
| All right, we have about 10 or 12 minutes or so for questions. | ||
| I'll look around. | ||
| We've got a couple questions. | ||
| I see you in the front row, so my colleague will bring the microphone up to you here in the second row, Isabel. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Hi, my name is Zach. | ||
| I'm an LC for Congressman Henry Queyar. | ||
| I do our transportation policy. | ||
| Laredo, Texas is in our district the number one port in the United States, even bigger than the port of Long Beach. | ||
| Of course, the surface transportation reauthorization evidence is of great interest to our office. | ||
| I'm also curious about, as we talked about supply chain, the role of the Class 1 ownership of so much of the rail in this country plays in that. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that has major rail lines where a state corporation doesn't own its own rail. | ||
| I'm curious, one, what that means for supply chain for consumers, and two, where that stands in passenger rail service. | ||
| It's my understanding that because of PSR and other practices, the trains are now getting longer than passing lanes. | ||
| So this seems, you know, we're in the Class One's world, right? | ||
| Trying to make passenger rail work. | ||
| What can we do about that? | ||
| Thanks for the great question. | ||
| Panel, anyone would like to jump in? | ||
| I'm happy to speak to it from the freight railroads thinking about the freight perspective on this. | ||
| So I think that because we do have private ownership of our Class 1 railroads, which, as you note, is a bit of a unique model relative to the rest of the world, there have been a lot of benefits that have been achieved on the supply chain side. | ||
| So because they are private companies, they tend to be a little bit more nimble. | ||
| They tend to be able to make investments quickly and where they see fit. | ||
| And they tend to be able to react quickly to what they see is needed in the free market in terms of where service is and things of that nature. | ||
| And so from a freight perspective, I think that our freight rail network, frankly, is the envy of the world for a good reason. | ||
| It's not very often that you do hear about freight rail issues. | ||
| And so I think that it's something that has really, again, benefited the supply chain movements across the country. | ||
| Okay, thanks. | ||
| John Robert, please feel free to go ahead and Sean will definitely hear from you too. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Oh, microphone, please. | ||
| That's where a more robust FRA and STB involvement in this issue because freight rail, passenger rail come under Federal Railroad Administration, and so we'd like to see a little more hands-own with FRA. | ||
| And then SDB, of course, needs an expedited way of hearing those points of disagreement between passenger rail and freight rail. | ||
| And we face this along the Gulf, and we started with a freight rail request for $2.4 billion of infrastructure needed. | ||
| I'll remind you, we went to Mars for $2.3 billion. | ||
| We were just trying to get to Mobile. | ||
| Ultimately, that was resolved down to something over $200 million and was funded through, again, the CRISI program. | ||
| So we were able to work through the STB process. | ||
| And it was interesting. | ||
| STB said, you know, the aggrieved party is neither Amtrak nor the freight railroads. | ||
| It's the people of the Gulf that have been denied service. | ||
| So with that, resolution was achieved among all parties. | ||
| And I think that can be replicated. | ||
| And part of what we're doing with PRAC is to how we can facilitate a quicker resolution where there's conflict. | ||
| And there will be conflict. | ||
| But freights are more open to the provision of infrastructure. | ||
| Keep in mind it's within their right-of-way, paid for 80% out of a CRISI grant. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Sean, please feel free to go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, coastline what John Robert said. | ||
| I will say there are a few policy solutions that we've seen successfully carried out. | ||
| We are very close to one of them. | ||
| The Virginia Passenger Rail Authority acquired the DC to Richmond CSX main line. | ||
| They're still running freight trains on there, but Virginia, the Commonwealth, gets to, within certain contractual limitations, determine the kinds of investments. | ||
| They have a lot of say over dispatching practices, how long the trains you can run, how long the sidings need to be. | ||
| They're going to try to double-track that railroad, obviously. | ||
| And so I think there are, when I think about the Texas Triangle or the Texas T, whatever you want to call it, that's potentially an example where you might see state acquisition. | ||
| I don't think Texas is there yet politically, but logistically, it could make sense. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And again, thanks for the great question. | ||
| Other questions in the audience? | ||
| I'll bring the microphone over to you. | ||
| Oh, we have one over here on the side. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Oh, up against the wall, Isabel. | ||
| So, kind of just going off that question, is there, like I know, in terms of acquiring right-of-way, whether it's through easements or any other form that commuter and intercity rail can tackle, | ||
| is there a role for Congress to support states in terms of making it easier for them to either lease or access right-of-way at certain times or outright acquire and kind of I know that's kind of going off what his question was, but right now it's really up to states and opening up their pocketbooks. | ||
| But is there something folks here to do? | ||
| I'll just give a little plug for we've worked with Congressman Moulton's office on a section of the American High Speed Rail Act that looks at advanced acquisition authority, certain tax credits that would be put in place for railroads that do sell their rights of way. | ||
| Eventually, I think you're kind of directionally headed there. | ||
| It is kind of a political problem, and you've got to have the right level of ambition at the state level. | ||
| I think it really helped the Commonwealth of Virginia that they were so close to the Northeast Corridor, so there was like this ready-built high-frequency rail corridor that they were like, if we can just close this last little gap, we can plug into it and get the network effects. | ||
| So it's one of those things where I think if there was the federal government showed sustained investment in the rail program, you might start to see more state-level political institutions say, okay, it's real, it's here, it's time for us to take advantage of that. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| John Michael? | ||
| John Robert? | ||
| I'd just say the simple answer to your question is yes. | ||
| A federal partner in the use of that right-of-way. | ||
| Think about all of the unused right-of-way in any freight car today. | ||
| Track has been pulled up. | ||
| All of that property you see outside of the window of your passenger car that's cleared once had track in it. | ||
| So the acquisition of unused right-of-way, even if it's leased from freights, could really spur the investment in passenger rail, and certainly in certain corridors where that exists. | ||
| So yes, a federal partner would be a great help. | ||
| I think we have, we're pretty close to time. | ||
| Elaine, did you have anything that you wanted to comment on that question? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, I wanted to, we're not going to call it the highway bill. | ||
| We agree, it's more than that. | ||
| We know that we're in a whole briefing series about the fact that it's more than just highways, although we do have a briefing about highways coming up. | ||
| But I'd like to maybe leave the audience today with a question about sort of like where we are in the process and what you'll be looking for. | ||
| So, for your industries, for what you would maybe see as positive outcomes in surface transportation reauthorization. | ||
| John Robert, maybe we'll start with you and then we'll go down through the line. | ||
| But what will you be watching for over the course of, let's say, the rest of this calendar year that will inform how you're thinking about how the process is going, and from a congressional staff person's perspective, things that they should be watching for that might encourage conversations in their offices about how to get their bosses involved. | ||
| Well, I think we already see and accept that for large metropolitan areas, fast and rail connectivity makes sense. | ||
| I'd like to see a growing realization that passenger rail is an important component to less densely populated states, rural America, and those small towns that depend on connectivity into their larger region. | ||
| Keep in mind in Europe, it's not all high-speed rail, it's conventional rail linking into higher speed that connects all of those communities. | ||
| So, a realization that this has never been a Republican versus Democrat subject, as I hope I illustrated in my slides. | ||
| It's one where we come together to solve the needs of your citizens in their connectivity, regardless of the party you represent, the state you're in, or the region you're from. | ||
| Yeah, the combinations of members you had in your slides, I'd love to have known what else they talked about. | ||
| Elaine, what will you be looking for as the process starts to pick up speed, pun intended, over the next couple months, maybe a year or so? | ||
| Yeah, the overall size of the bill is something that we are very keyed in on for a couple of reasons. | ||
| Leading up to the IIJA, there was a lot of, and through its passage, there was a lot of sales talk about how this was a once-in-a-generation investment and that we needed to make this significant investment just this time, and it's once-in-a-generation. | ||
| But we know that for years and years, America was underinvesting in its infrastructure. | ||
| And we also know that since the IIJA was passed in 2021, the cost of building has gone up 50%. | ||
| So, we are only getting half of the purchasing power. | ||
| Any step back is going to really just take our nation very far back across all modes, all types of transportation. | ||
| So, the overall size of the bill is key here as we move forward. | ||
| Great, thanks. | ||
| Sean, this gives you the last word. | ||
| You can either answer my question or you can share another takeaway with our audience today. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great question. | ||
| I'm not sure I have a great answer to it. | ||
| It feels like every week has a new surprise, and a lot of them are not pleasant. | ||
| And so, one of the things we're just waiting for is to see this year's Department of Transportation come out with an actual budget at the how much do you want to fund Amtrak level. | ||
| It could help us understand what kind of priorities the administration has. | ||
| We haven't had a lot of venues for there to be committee hearings. | ||
| And so, we're keeping our ears open, but I'm hoping we don't have an existential fight about should Amtrak even exist because that's going to be not good for this conversation. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Great presentations. | ||
| I think you all deserve a round of applause for being great panelists today. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We're going to close things down, and I'd like to once again thank Representative Tonko and his staff for help with the room today. | ||
| And thanks to Representative Hushi for joining us via pre-recorded remarks and to her great staff for helping to make that possible. | ||
| I also have great colleagues at EESI, so big thanks to Dan O, who helped with the video earlier, and Amri, Allison, Hannah, Anna, and Nicole for all their help. | ||
| This is also the first briefing of our summer with our summer interns. | ||
| And so welcome to Isabel and Jasmine for welcome to EESI for the summer and thanks for all your help today. | ||
| Thanks to Brendan in the back and also to our friends at C-SPAN. | ||
| Next up, we have briefings in our next era of transportation and infrastructure series about highways. | ||
| That's going to be June 13th. | ||
| And then we will be moving into extreme heat. | ||
| Unfortunately, the summer is likely to be a hot one. | ||
| And so we're working with our friends at the Federation of American Scientists to do a briefing about extreme heat and the heat action plan. | ||
| That will be June 17th. | ||
| And our next rapid readout, and this one's going to be the one about where we are in the budget reconciliation process with Brookings expert Molly Reynolds, that's going to be June 6th at noon. | ||
| Signing up for climate change solutions is the best way to keep up with everything that we've got going on. | ||
| So I hope you can do that. | ||
| And we also are just about two months out from the Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Policy Forum. | ||
| That will be Thursday, July 24th in this room and in the Rayburn foyer. | ||
| If you have a few moments, I know we had some livecast issues today, but if you have a few moments to take our survey, let us know what you thought about the program. | ||
| We'd really appreciate it. | ||
| We read every response and we do our best to make things better next time. | ||
| So to John Robert, to Elaine, and to Sean, thank you so much for joining us today. | ||
| Hope you all are able to stay dry on this rainy Wednesday afternoon. | ||
| And we'll wrap it up there. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Coming up Monday morning. | ||
| Notice Senate reporter Ursula Perano will talk about the week ahead in Congress and upcoming Senate action on the GOP tax cut and spending bill. | ||
| And then Spectrum News national political reporter Taylor Popolars talks about White House News of the Day and the week ahead. | ||
| And American Compass founder Oren Cass will talk about his new book, The New Conservatives: Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry and President Trump's Tariffs Agenda. | ||
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