Director of the Center for Land Use at Shippensburg University

George Pomeroy, a geographer and expert in community and land-use planning, is director of the Center for Land Use at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pa. The center  promotes sound land use planning with the goal of enhancing the quality of life in a five-county service region in south-central Pennsylvania.

Pomeroy chairs the Local Governance Committee of the Interstate 81 Corridor Coalition. The group is comprised of local, regional, and state government, planning, and transportation agencies, as well as private sector and non-profit groups, in the six states that I-81 runs through – Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. The coalition is interested in sound transportation planning that results in the safe, efficient, and environmentally sensitive movement of freight and passenger traffic through the corridor.

Question:

Norfolk Southern Corp. is working to expand the rail capacity of its Crescent Corridor, a 2,500-mile route that carries domestic intermodal freight from the Southeast to Northeast markets, including along the I-81 corridor. Do you view this as a positive thing for the I-81 corridor?

Answer:

Any chance we have to better plan a corridor that shifts some of the freight load from trucks to rail, in a smart and economical way, the better it is.

The relative location of Interstate 81, particularly in south central Pennsylvania running down into Virginia, offers an optimal juncture with respect to populations, markets, and existing infrastructure. But when the interstate itself is so congested with trucks, along with the associated negative environmental and safety impacts, that congestion threatens to choke access – the very thing that brings our success.    

If you have more freight going to rail instead of being camped out all along the corridor in trucks – and in some cases several miles off the corridor – the impacts would be more localized rather than spread throughout the corridor. The more freight we have moving by rail, the more local communities along that corridor stand to benefit – it’s a no brainer.

There are plenty of win-wins with the Crescent Corridor. You can tabulate that by the jobs to be created, the tax revenue generated, the reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions, or the improvements in safety and lives saved. Those are all tangible benefits that everybody’s going to see – it doesn’t matter whether they view this from an environmental perspective, from a health perspective, from a rail perspective, or from a transportation industry perspective. Maybe certain individual trucking operators might pay the price of not being nimble enough to make the adjustments, but I can’t think of any losses.