Senior Vice President for Community Development of the Greater Memphis Chamber

Dexter Muller is senior vice president for community development of the Greater Memphis Chamber.  Muller is responsible for infrastructure development, the Memphis Regional Logistics Council, community development, public policy, work force development, and business continuity planning for the Memphis business community.  Before joining the chamber nine years ago, Muller served as director of planning and development for Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn., including overseeing transportation planning and economic development.

Question:

Norfolk Southern is planning to construct a major intermodal terminal in Fayette County, Tenn., adjacent to Memphis, as part of its Crescent Corridor rail network.  How do you think the Memphis region will benefit from the new intermodal facility and the improved rail corridor?

Answer:

Over its history, Memphis’ transportation system has evolved from river, to rail, to road, to air, and Memphis now is one of the few cities in the United States that offers a truly quadramodal system.  For the last 10 years, as manufacturing has shifted to Asia, we’ve started to see rail emerge again as a strong alternative, with finished goods shipped into U.S. ports and then moved across the country in intermodal containers. We consider the Crescent Corridor an essential component of our economic development strategy. We’ve worked hard with the railroad to come up with a plan that I think can change the distribution of commercial goods in the eastern part of the United States.

Memphis has about 50 companies that have more than a half-million square feet of warehouse space and a total of over 150 million square feet, so this is a huge sector of our economy. With the Crescent Corridor, we’ll have a new intermodal yard that that will give distribution facilities a faster connection to markets in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that will be in close competition with the time and quality of service offered by trucks. That’s something we’ve never been able to say before, and will be an important driver for economic development.

There are more than 1,000 acres in proximity to the site of the new intermodal facility that will be developed into a private industrial park. That’s enough acreage to house approximately 20 million square feet of warehousing and distribution space. Obviously, it would take years to absorb that kind of footage at one site in the region, but it shows the potential. The rail terminal is being built in an area that has a fairly high unemployment rate, and this is one of the first real significant economic development projects for those communities. They need the jobs, the capital investment, and the tax base. This project is going to contribute to the economy of west Tennessee and north Mississippi as well, so it’s a bi-state impact.

In addition to the regional benefits, the Crescent Corridor is important for the country. Railroads are a very prominent part of the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Shipping goods by rail is more fuel-efficient and less polluting than by truck, so use of the rail corridor can help companies reduce their carbon footprint across their supply chain and help cities along the route comply with federal air quality standards.

Along with that, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission has concluded that the interstate highway system cannot be expanded to accommodate the amount of growth in vehicle miles and freight movements that we’re going to need as a nation. It’s essential to have rail fill that gap.

The objective of the Crescent Corridor is to take a million long-haul trucks off the interstates between the Southeast and Northeast markets. In the short run, that will help reduce congestion and improve air quality. Longer term, it also will improve the prospects of not having to try to add more lanes on to the interstates, which, given our national budget issues, probably will not get done.