CREATE's 75th Street project: Lots of benefits, but no funding

A Metra SouthWest Service train overtakes a Norfolk Southern intermodal move at Forest Hill Junction, the epicenter of CREATE's planned 75th Street project, in February 2015. Photo by David Lassen

Around here, we pay a lot of attention to CREATE, the program to address railroad bottlenecks in the Chicago area. This is because of the obvious advantages if trains, freight or passenger, are able to move more quickly between Point A and Point B.

There are other people in Chicago who think about CREATE in loftier terms — like what it could mean for addressing pollution, or economic development, or even the quality of life.

Several of those people gathered last Thursday night for a panel discussion on CREATE’s proposed 75th Street Corridor Improvement Project, the biggest remaining piece in the 70-part puzzle to make Chicago railroading run more efficiently. (For a refresher on the 75th Street project, take a look at Fred Frailey’s “Fixing Chicago” feature in the July 2015 Trains. Alternately, CREATE explains it here.)

Notably, at least to me, this panel included no one from a railroad. I came to believe this was probably a good thing — because the participants’ support underlined how far-reaching the impact of 75th Street project could be. (And, with no railroad representative, no one had to face  potentially embarrassing questions about the railroads’ inability to agree on their part of project funding, as recently reported by Crain’s Chicago Business.)

The panel, organized by the Center for Neighborhood Technology Young Innovators and the Chicago chapter of Young Professionals in Transportation, included:

— Jeffrey Sriver, director of transportation planning and programming for the City of Chicago Department of Transportation;
— Thomas Murtha, senior planner for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning;
— Benjamin Brockschmidt, vice president, policy, and executive director, infrastructure council, for the Illinois Chamber of Commerce;
— David Chandler, principal business analyst for the Center for Neighborhood Technology;
— moderator Kevin Brubaker, deputy director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center.

That’s a pretty diverse group. As Brockschmidt noted, “We have business, we have government, we have quasi-government, and we have a not-for-profit all sitting here and discussing how good this is and the benefit of it.”

For this group, the benefits were not so much getting a train from Point A to Point B more quickly, but what becomes possible when that happens on a regular basis.

Improved traffic flow and highway safety, for example. Part of CREATE addresses street congestion — 25 of its projects deal with grade-crossing separation — but smoother rail movements could do more, Chandler said, by making it possible to bring intermodal traffic closer to the city.

“When trucks are coming to the Chicago region from, say, Joliet or Rochelle, that’s a 70-mile truck dray through congested expressways,” he said. “If the truck is unloading at, say the Landers yard on 75th street, or at 47th Street, that’s a big difference. They’re going 10 or 15 miles. … One of the things we want to think about, when we think about environmental and economic issues, is how can we minimize truck traffic?”

Economic issues were the biggest selling point for the 75th Street Project, though. Murtha said that 200,000 jobs and $13 billion of income are tied to the “freight cluster” in the Chicago region, and that delays are “a threat to our economy.

“We’re going to have fairly dramatically growing volumes over the next couple of decades,” he said, “and we need to facilitate those volumes and make the system work.” (That will not be cheap, Brockschmidt noted: “In the state of Illinois, you’re looking at roughly $75 billion in surface transportation needs for the next 25 years just for operations and maintenance.”)

Reliable transportation, Chandler said, is a “magnet” for business: “You build an intermodal terminal, and at the same time, you build an industrial park … and create thousands of jobs.”

And, Brockschmidt said, the area around the 75th Street project is ripe for redevelopment: “You have a lot of brownfield, where you have these old steel mills that have highway access, rail access, lake access and inland waterway access via the canal. We are sitting on top of a gold mine. But at the end of the day, freight is going to flow downhill as quickly as possible. … [The improved traffic flow from the project] is an economic advantage not only the railroad companies, or the companies that do the construction. It benefits your manufacturer, your food processor, your aggregate company.”

And, he said, the potential for improved Metra service that comes with the project is a quality-of-life issue: “These are all things that are good attracting not just business, but people, to come here and take advantage of these kinds of things.”

From a news standpoint, not a lot has changed from our report in July 2015, other than the price: a $1 billion figure, merely suggested then, now seems to be the official estimate. And there is thought of splitting the project in to two parts. The CSX flyover at Forest Hill Junction and grade-crossing separation at 71st Street would go first (for $400 million), with the rest to follow.

Of course, until funding appears, the project has precisely zero parts. And all those potential benefits?  They’re sitting out there in the distance, like so many trains waiting to find their way through Chicago.