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CSX: Project Will Help Everyone’s Traffic But Polk’s

Posted May 21, 2007 by Billy Townsend

Updated May 21, 2007 at 05:49 PM

Rick Hood, the CSX real estate official heading up the Winter Haven hub plan, on Monday morning addressed the annual retreat of the Central Florida Development Council, Polk’s countywide economic development group, and took questions.

Hood spent much of his statement describing how the CSX project will help ease national and state truck traffic in two ways:

1) By taking freight containers off trucks and placing them onto trains for cross-country hauls to Winter Haven.

2) Serving as the catalyst for a half-billion dollar plan that will create Orlando-area commuter rail. And just in case you don’t realize how completely linked that plan is to the CSX hub, Hood noted that commuter rail line “doesn’t become available” until the new hub is functioning.

He went on to praise Winter Haven city government, Polk County government and the Florida Department of Transportation for their strong support of the project, saying: “They’ve got the vision.”

Then he talked directly to the business figures assembled and said: “You all get it.” He said that was refreshing because the company goes “into a lot of places where people don’t get it.”

But what exactly do they get?

What I heard Hood say is that the CSX hub will reduce truck traffic elsewhere in the country and state by increasing it in Polk, along with train traffic. And at the same time, the new commuter rail line is going to stop at Polk’s northeast border. In other words, all the traffic burdens are borne by Polk, while all the traffic benefits go elsewhere, particularly Orlando.

So I asked Hood if I understood that correctly. He answered yes.

His caveat was that the new hub’s “economic development is not going to benefit Orlando.”

But let’s look at the economic development question, from the point-of-view of jobs. Part of the deal for commuter rail involves shutting down Orlando’s Taft rail yard. I asked Hood if employees at that yard would be offered some of the 200 CSX jobs projected for the new hub. He said that was likely. I asked how many people work at Taft. Hood didn’t know.

Hood also spent a good deal of time explaining how the proposed CSX hub really isn’t a rail yard because it won’t be handling chemicals and other industrial material. The state has not done him any favors in his mission to “educate” people about this. In its press release announcing the deal last year, the state called the CSX hub “the mother of all rail yards.”
Lastly, there seems to be wide disparity in the truck traffic figures being thrown around. I have continually cited this statement in Winter Haven’s approval document for the hub: “CSX anticipates the inter-modal facility will generate a daily traffic volume of approximately 1,150 trips with 110 of these trips occurring at the peak-hour.”

But Hood and other backers of the project have cited figures in the hundreds. I’m going to stay with 1,150 until I see a document saying differently or get a clear explanation of what’s changed.