Our Views: Taking trains down river
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The winds of Hurricane Katrina pushed Baton Rouge and New Orleans closer together than ever before, emphasizing the common economic future of the two largest cities in the state.
One positive effect of the storms is to resurrect the long-sought goal of a passenger rail line linking Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
While this would be a new venture in recent decades in Louisiana, it’s hardly a unique one.
Santa Fe is much smaller than Albuquerque, but the two New Mexico cities recognized that commuter rail makes sense between the two largest cities — one the capital — in that state. Other progressive cities are using rail links as an alternative to highway gridlock.
Planners engaged by the Louisiana Recovery Authority after the 2005 hurricanes recommended that passenger rail be one of the ways to fulfill a number of purposes for the future of the region: It would link the economies of the two cities, and perhaps eventually could encompass the North Shore cities above Lake Pontchartain as well.
Passenger rail is also a way to mitigate the increasing congestion of Interstate 10 and to promote denser and more environmentally friendly development, LRA planners said.
One of the nation’s transportation experts, Gil Carmichael of the University of Denver’s Intermodal Transportation Institute, told an LSU audience recently that the idea of a commuter train between the two cities is a no-brainer.
Cedric Grant, deputy secretary of the state Department of Transportation and Development, said the department is taking more of a look at the potential of intercity rail connections after the hurricanes.
Even before the hurricanes, projections of traffic growth along the I-10/I-12 corridor suggested that some alternative must be found to adding lanes to a congested system.
A rail alternative makes more sense in light of the the long-term projections for population growth in the Gulf Coast region. From San Antonio across to Mobile, there is a new coastal belt where millions of new homes and businesses will locate in the coming decades.
We hope that DOTD will look seriously at this way to join the two cities and give commuters an alternative to I-10 gridlock.
