Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 02:26, 3 February 2022

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== The Challenge ==

Chicago is considered the railroad hub of North America. The region dominates the U.S. rail market in both market share and total volume, handling 47% of the nation’s intermodal rail containers and 28% of rail cars, carrying a total of $641 billion worth of goods each year.<ref>Annual carloads and value; 2017 Surface Transportation Board confidential waybill sample</ref> Twenty-seven percent of all jobs in Cook County are freight-dependent industries that produce 56% of the County’s economic output.<ref>{{Cite web|date=October 2018|title=Connecting Cook County Freight Plan|url=https://www.cookcountyil.gov/file/8306/download?token=x8gOHe0d|url-status=live|page=5|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200423190912/https://www.cookcountyil.gov/file/8306/download?token=x8gOHe0d |archive-date=2020-04-23 }}</ref>

The Chicago region’s rail infrastructure was largely configured to serve transportation needs and demands at the time it was originally built more than a century ago. By the 1990s, many decades of modernization and consolidation within the freight and passenger railroad industries had drastically changed the operational demands being placed on this network. Train lengths, routing patterns, capacity needs, rail-highway grade crossing conflicts and control technologies had all evolved over the years, but the region’s rail infrastructure had not been sufficiently modernized to accommodate the new demands. This resulted in serious delays, which had cascading effects across the nation’s rail network. Oftentimes, shared control of rail facilities within the Chicago region had created institutional challenges to implementing needed modernization. Under direction from the Surface Transportation Board and various elected officials and following several years of cooperative study and analysis by public agencies and private railroads, the CREATE Program was initiated in 2003 to identify, prioritize and address these infrastructure modernization needs. The closely related Chicago Transportation Coordination Office was also established at that time to address rail operations coordination needs in the region.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Council|first=Metropolitan Planning|title=CREATE: Past, Present, and Future|url=https://www.metroplanning.org/news/article/3324|access-date=2021-07-06|website=Metropolitan Planning Council}}</ref>