Editorial

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Re-C R E ATE

As shippers, road builders, truckers and railroads set their positions for the upcoming battle next year over the surface transportation reauthorization, it’s not too early to set standards for judging the work Congress produces.

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It’s especially important, in fact, because the last highway bill was such a dismal failure. It was a failure for the reasons that made it famous, of course, but more particularly because of the way Congress pieced together $286 billion in spending while turning its back almost entirely to true projects of national significance.

That’s why we believe a major measure of the 2009 transportation bill should be the attention Congress gives to perhaps the most important of all the national efforts to improve freight and passenger transportation, the CREATE project in Chicago.

Amid the outcry over earmarks and wasteful spending in the 2003 bill — you know, the one that passed in 2005 — for us the true failure was not the way federal money was directed toward bridges to nowhere but the way important plans to improve the flow of people and commerce were shrugged aside. It’s unlikely that any project could match the impact on the national economy of CREATE and yet the plan came away with $100 million instead of the $900 million it needed, leaving the project with enough to do little more than tread water.

That’s a shame because CREATE is the sort of innovative and far-reaching transportation plan the country needs. It takes the nuts-and-bolts of the myriad bottlenecks, rail junctions and highway crossings and that slice through the region and treats them as one package, proposing a series of improvements that add up to an integrated solution.

On the surface, the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Effi-

ciency program is mostly a regional rail and highway project.

But because of Chicago’s unique role in the national rail network — 500 freight trains and 700 passenger trains converge there each day, and all four U.S. Class I railroads meet there — the project’s impact would reach across the continent, opening up a major chokepoint at the center of the rail map.

This project does everything a transportation infrastructure plan should; it reaches across jurisdictions, industries and modes to ease the flow of goods, people and commerce.

Unfortunately, CREATE also has to find a way around the political bottleneck that likely has made the project far more expensive than the $1.53 billion price tag it carried in 2003.

According to Earl Wacker, a director and CSX representative on the Chicago Transportation Coordination Office, CREATE planning assumes 4.5 percent inflation for 2007 and 2008. That’s an optimistic reading of inflation in construction costs when you consider how steel and energy prices have grown, but it’s still enough to add $189,000 a day to the CREATE plans as drawn.

How much will it take now to make CREATE work? “We’re working on that, because we know Congress will ask, but we don’t have number yet,” Wacker said.

The last time around, of course, what we saw was the price of failure.

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