Freight Planning Without An Associated Economic Development Plan?

From the 6/29/15 Progressive Railroading:    Legislators debut bill to invest in multimodal freight infrastructure

http://www.progressiverailroading.com/intermodal/news/Legislators-debut-bill-to-invest-in-multimodal-freight-infrastructure–44901

Read this legislative update from Progressive Railroading magazine.

Whether or not we like it or are willing to admit it, the silos are still firmly in-place.  Yes, there’s a lot of talk about transport planning and economic development strategy working in tandem, but the reality is that this is mostly about good intentions and not about sophisticated and coordinated actions.  not yet.   Is there hope?  We say yes, in fact we think it’s critical that we get this right.

State freight plans are still generally a lot of commodity flow analyses and assessments of transport systems from perspective of transport planners.  In other words, we are using as measurements static forecasts that do not account for changes in competitiveness, policy and technology evolution (or revolutions!)  There are very few examples of transport plans that take advice from advanced economic strategy about “moving the needle” – where public policy (transport, labor/skills, taxation, regulation, strategic infrastructure, 3P) leads the way with transport planning following growth projections.  In fact, right now it almost always works in the reverse.  And on the national level – well the talk is even higher-level and we are even more distant from doing good “economic development”.

So, talk of more money being plowed into US “multimodal freight infrastructure” is probably a very good thing.  The US has woefully underspent on infrastructure maintenance and modernization, and certainly as it relates to supporting our ambitions for increased trade and economic wealth.  That said, I am not at all convinced that it’s just a matter of spending more – what we spend it on matters a heck of a lot.  Following the “stimulus spending” example of asking for project ideas to be submitted up the chain for administrative (and political) evaluation was at best needle in a haystack.  The article describes a “competitive grant program” which sounds like a lot less science and a lot more chaos and in the end, wasteful spending.

We can do better.  But we will need clear economic development and sector competitiveness objectives – and then transport infrastructure requirements becomes a lot more clear.