In The News

PBS Program Examines Roads vs. Rails Question in Infrastructure Debate

In one of the week's most popular videos from the PBS show "Now," the network takes an in-depth (for TV news) and largely balanced and accurate look at the questions of truck vs. rail in the infrastructure debate.

The nearly half-hour piece that aired the last week of August, "Keep on Trucking? Would you pay more in taxes to fix roads and rail?" is part of a year-long, PBS-wide series on the country's infrastructure called "Blueprint America."

As host David Brancaccio notes in his introduction, "Our whole country, coast to coast, has a case of hardening of the arteries. Our highways and our railroads are clogged and antiquated. Cars and trains need these arteries to get where they're going, and they need to get freight ... from here to there."

Keep on Truckin'

Correspondent Miles O'Brien starts the segment with a hands-on attempt to back up a big rig at the Shore Tractor Trailer Driving School in Forked River, N.J. He kills a cone.

Turns out business at the school is booming, because displaced workers during the recession are looking to truck driving as a replacement. And the trucker-turned-instructor, who tells him that a truck is like a good woman, also drives home the message that if you got it, a truck brought it.

In fact, O'Brien points out, "it all adds up to 43 million tons of freight traveling nearly 12 billion miles each and every day in America -- about 300 pounds of stuff a day for each and every American, and the vast majority of it rides on trucks."

And, he says, it's going to get worse as the economy grows. If government predictions hold true, he says, there will be millions more within the next decade, "pounding the already pothole-plagued pavement."

President Obama has pledged to fix the roads, the segment notes, with a clip from Obama touting the largest investment in infrastructure since Eisenhower's Interstate System.

The big question, and the point of the segment, is how should we spend that investment? Should we repair what we have, or rethink the way we move goods across America?

The RR Alternative

Enter the roads vs. rails debate. While the piece does point out that trucks and rails often work together on intermodal freight, O'Brien notes that both highways and rails need major investments in infrastructure. And each is lobbying for its piece of the pie in Washington, D.C.

ATA President Bill Graves tells O'Brien that "we have an insatiable appetite in America for things coming to us, sustaining our quality of life, in a really timely manner ... trucking more than any over mode of freight transportation, makes sure things are on the shelves ... in a very timely manner."

But the railroads, as you probably realize if you've watched much television, have mounted a campaign emphasizing that trains are much more fuel-efficient and "greener" than trucks. Now includes a clip of an ad from freightrailworks.org, which aired in Washington, D.C., before legislators went on break, touting the fact that each train can take 280 trucks off the road.

Congested Rails

But not so fast, O'Brien notes. Yes, fixing and updating highways won't be easy or cheap. "Rail may sound like an easy alternative, but most of the lines were cleared and built in the 19th century," he explains. Rails abandoned half of their lines in the '70s when they were in financial straits, and the remaining lines can be just as congested as the highways. "You just don't know it because you don't drive a locomotive to work," he says. In Chicago, in fact, freight moves so slowly, he reports, that the freight is often unloaded, trucked across town, then put back on the rails to complete the journey.

"Bottom line: Making rails a real alternative will require some real money."

From the trucking school and the crowded streets of Newark and the CSX intermodal yard, O'Brien moves to Washington, D.C., and reports on the debate on reauthorizing the highway funding. Rep. Oberstar's $450 billion surface transportation act would make huge investments to modernize the nation's current infrastructure, as well as attempt to rethink how the system might better work in the future. But the Obama Administration wants Congress to wait 18 months, which has Oberstar "hopping mad." The economy will rebound faster, he says, if transportation is modernized.

Ouch

There are a few bits that did make me cringe. Near the beginning, as they bleep an obscenity from trucker-turned-instructor, O'Brien just has to make a comment about "apparently the first lesson is to talk like a truck driver."

Then there's the community organizer in Newark, N.J., who's unhappy about the huge number of trucks coming and going from a nearby port. "And all that exhaust just doesn't sit well in our lungs," intones O'Brien, saying it's a "major cause of asthma and other respiratory problems." It's hard to sit and listen to that, knowing the strides that have been made in creating cleaner diesel engines -- engines so clean that in some areas, the exhaust going out may be cleaner than the air going into the engine.

But O'Brien hsd it absolutely right as he sums up the situation: "Society takes it all for granted - we want what we want, plentiful, inexpensive yet high qaulity goods, delivered fast and cheap." It may "seem like magic," he says, "but it is actually about planning ahead and making big investments.

"That's what our grandparents did a few generations ago. Now it may be our turn to pay the freight."

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