"The public mindset has changed"

Railway Age, March, 2004 by William C. Vantuono

In mid-1998, shortly after Ed Hamberger took over the reins of the Association of American Railroads, we wrote (RA, July 1998, p. 4): "The poor image of the railroads in the public eye is one of the challenges that will confront Hamberger.... The [railroads'] record ... is a good one. Communicating it is something else. 'The greatest story never told' may overstate the problem. But it's a story too rarely told."

Despite some recent setbacks in Washington (p. 14), the industry appears to have made some real progress improving public perception that sooner or later should pay off. One industry leader who believes that a not-so-subtle shift in public opinion has occurred is Norfolk Southern's David Goode.

"The exciting thing to me is the very wide acceptance in the public eye that rail investments should be made wherever there are large transportation needs," Goode told me in an interview for this month's cover story. "A huge mindset change has taken place during my career. Long-range, it's a very powerful change in perception, where you went from the public not even thinking about freight rail--or if they did think about it, they thought in terms of a few coal cars chugging down the tracks. Now there's a public awareness of the potential for intermodal on a big scale, that rail is the option for the future. We're a 175-year old industry, but we're the future of transportation, and the public is beginning to understand that. I absolutely believe the mindset has changed. The same thing is true for passenger rail."

"What we need to do," said Goode, "is find ways that we can be creative and respond quickly to needs that develop. The Chicago Plan is a good example of that. It's important that it get funding and that we prove what we can do with it. Our I-81 project (Virginia) has been well-accepted, because the public sees the hard reality that you just can't spend enough increasing truck lanes, that rail is a logical solution that makes sense for everyone. There's also general political agreement that it's a good idea."

Goode said that freight "isn't going to move" unless more investments are made in public/private partnerships "where they make sense." Public policy "demands that," he said. "The exciting thing is that our industry, the government, and the general public all seem to understand that P3s should be an important part of public policy. But it will take a lot of sorting through to see exactly how it should be done."

Growth in the rail industry, Goode said, is in the national interest, "because other forms of transportation are constricted. We have the ability to grow. We just need the capital to do it."

Whether the industry will be able to raise that capital independently or require some form of public investment remains the subject of much debate. Part of finding a solution, as Goode said, is providing "the best value in transportation"--and getting paid for it.

"The industry has an imperative to reverse the downward pricing curve," Goode emphasized. "For too many years, the industry has been in a pattern of pricing its services far too cheaply. We are still paying a terrible price for that, because we created a mindset with our customers about the value of our service, that we would always sell it cheaply. By doing that, we were making it impossible to pro duce the capital to improve our service."

For more of David Goode's thoughts, and the kinds of things Norfolk Southern is doing to provide high-value transportation, see p. 29.

Can you hear me now? Since 1997, Federal Railroad Administration RSAC (Railroad Safety Advisory Committee) Working Group 97-2, which includes management and labor, has been developing noise exposure limits for locomotive cab occupants. Last year, the RSAC, based upon the Working Group's consensus, approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that was expected to be published in the Federal Register by December 2003, followed by a 90 day comment period. Early this year, the Office of Management and Budget designated the NPRM as a "significant regulatory action" under the terms of Executive Order 12866. This requires the U.S. Department of Transportation to place the NPRM under additional review, which could minimally take another 120 days.

Low-frequency noise is believed to be the most damaging to hearing, long-term. Technology has been developed to address this. One of the more interesting ones is called active noise control, which has been applied quite successfully in the trucking industry. For more on this, see p. 23.