By Govs. Bob Riley, Haley Barbour, Ed Rendell, Phil Bredesen and Bob McDonnell
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Op-Ed:
…Interstates connecting the South and Northeast are choked with traffic. As much as 40 percent of the traffic on Interstate 81 in Virginia is made up of trucks on a highway designed to carry no more than 15 percent truck traffic. And traffic on the increasingly congested road is projected to increase 67 percent over the next decade. Building interstates isn’t a solution: There is not enough land, and the federal and state governments don’t have the money.
A project called the Crescent Corridor, a 2,500-mile rail route stretching across 13 states from New Jersey to Tennessee and Louisiana, would offer significant economic and environmental benefits by creating tens of thousands of jobs and moving trucks off crowded highways such as I-81….
A study by the transportation consulting firm Cambridge Systematics estimates that, over the next 30 years, the Crescent Corridor project would return $25 in economic and environmental benefits for every dollar invested…
Click here to read the full article.
