Dear Editor:
Union Pacific’s announcement that they are spending millions of dollars to purchase 500 new refrigerated boxcars equipped with satellite tracking devices, giving it a total of 5,500 reefer cars, is bitter news to San Benito County’s ag shippers.
With the closest team track located in Watsonville, SBC’s shippers of ag commodities who order a car to load must truck their tonnage over local highways to the loading point in Watsonville, with all the extra expenses of hauling it over the road.
Not only does this place local ag at a competitive disadvantage, it increases highway congestion, air pollution and road maintenance expenses. With Congress getting ready to relax the freeze on long-combination vehicles, loosen hours of service limits on commercial truck drivers and harmonize gross vehicle weight at one of our NAFTA partner’s levels, one can easily picture what this means to highway safety advocates and motorists.
COG’s directors spend millions of taxpayers dollars on such things as bike paths and empty transit buses, but they ignore the benefits that a team track could yield. Both ISTEA and TEA-21 (and very likely TEA-21’s successor legislation due out this fall) provided for such private-public partnerships for increased rail economic development. When will COG’s directors wake-up and plan transportation infrastructure improvements that capitalize on our private sector?
Just imagine the jobs that COG’s directors could save our country.
Joseph P. Thompson
Tres Pinos
