Director of Transportation Economics at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Mark Burton is a faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he is director of transportation economics at the Center for Transportation Research. He serves on committees of the Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Research Council, a private, nonprofit that is the principal operating agency of the National Academies.

Burton led a UTK study that examined potential economic benefits from intermodal terminals Norfolk Southern plans to construct in Tennessee as part of its Crescent Corridor project. NS is planning a regional intermodal facility in Fayette County, near Memphis, and a smaller terminal in Jefferson County, near Knoxville, in east Tennessee.

Question:

What kind of economic benefits will communities near Norfolk Southern’s planned intermodal facilities in Tennessee experience?

Answer:

What this means for the communities is that, over time, they’ll get a lot of distribution centers, warehouse centers, and light manufacturing activity that they would no way see otherwise. You might expect to see businesses that manufacture such things as auto parts and electronics locating nearby. These are pretty good paying jobs, averaging around $40,000 a year, and they would be coming to areas where there typically are fewer job and economic opportunities. When you say, ‘OK, you could have 5,000 or 6,000 of these jobs,’ that’s really a major gain. Any community that manages to land an intermodal facility is going to be way, way out front in terms of jobs availability for local residents.

When we do these studies, we try to be balanced in developing our estimates. These intermodal facilities offer such great opportunities that there’s no reason to overstate their value. If you take a very balanced and a very fair approach, you’re still going to get a happy answer. I’m not aware of a single case of a railroad-supported development of this type that has not generated good paying jobs. They also provide a very stable and important source of local and state tax revenues.

Norfolk Southern has been perfectly honest in saying that this is a good opportunity for the railroad that will benefit its shareholders. That doesn’t mean it will not benefit the communities. In fact, the point is, this helps everyone – the railroad gets profits and traffic it can handle efficiently, the communities get jobs, and the jurisdictions get tax revenue. Everyone gets something that is useful.

Question:

What about people who worry that an intermodal facility might draw too much traffic and be disruptive in other ways?

Answer:

Railroads have gotten very good at designing facilities where light pollution and noise pollution are not issues. As far as traffic, highway engineers have gotten really good at figuring out how to link these facilities to roadway networks and segregating trailer trucks from local traffic. If you want something that generates jobs, you’d have a hard time finding anything that is a better neighbor than an intermodal facility.