“This project will benefit both Atlanta and Chattanooga with more efficient transportation, while also providing rail access to the rural communities in the region,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao. “This has been a long time in the making and represents a response to numerous transportation needs along the Interstate 75 corridor.”
The high speed project would run approximately 120 miles along Interstate 75 and provide a competitive and more reliable transportation choice for people traveling between Atlanta and Chattanooga. The chosen corridor includes eight rail stations and is estimated to take 88 minutes of travel time from the first to last station along the corridor. The route would begin on the east side of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at the proposed airport-Southern Crescent station and end at a proposed downtown Chattanooga station.
“This combined [statment] is a product of nine years’ work from FRA and its state partners,” said FRA Deputy Administrator Heath Hall. “The administration is working diligently to remove barriers, which slow down the environmental process so that people can get to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.”
The Georgia Department of Transportation studied the corridor as part of Georgia’s 1997 Intercity Rail Plan, which recommended further study – specifically with an emphasis on high-speed rail service. During the scoping process of the study, the Georgia agency and the Tennessee Department of Transportation identified 15 unique corridors between Atlanta and Chattanooga. The two state agencies then subjected those corridors to a screening process and ultimately narrowed them down to three corridors for the environmental statement.
The documents provide information on train technology, maximum operating speeds and station location options. However, decisions on these issues, as well as the exact alignment within the preferred corridor, will be part of a Tier II environmental study, if additional funding is secured.
More information is available online.
— A Federal Railroad Administration news release. Sept. 29, 2017.
Once again another proposal to build a high speed rail line ..great idea and another new location to build one..
However, Will it ever get built or operate ? highly unlikely when you look a t all the other ideas and proposals still on the drawing board for high speed rail lines in this country, we are still waiting and watching for that glorious day when this country can take its place among the other nations of this world and can have high speed
rail service linking our cities and towms. The Acela Express in the Northeast Corridor comes no way near what other nations have nowe and even developing. 150 mph trains is nothing…that is the average speed and the norm for most if not all local and intercity trains in other nations. Even 150 mph is hard for the Northeast Corridor and the Acela Express to do on most days. The high speed rail debate in this country reminds me on an episode on :The Honeymooners” when Alice asks Ralph time and time again to buy a television set and his answer is that he is waiting for 3D TV to come out which is at that time was only a dream and fantasy. Just like we are waiting to see when we will actually see and ride a high speed train capable of 200 mph which may never be experienced in our lifetimes.
Joseph C Markfelder
If it took 7 years just to narrow it down to 3 sites we should be honest with ourselves. This will never happen. Ever. Just buying/eminent domaining the right of way would take decades. Hell wake me in 10 years when they’ve finally picked a route. Then I’ll unleash the nimbys. Wish I didn’t sound so negative because it is a good idea, but Custer thought his battle plan was a good idea too.
John Degges – The proposed route follows I-75 out of the city. I-75 goes right under the existing Amtrak Station.
Jerry – of course there is crime on MARTA. There’s crime everywhere. Over 50 dead in Las Vegas? MARTAs just not anymore dangerous than anywhere else. No gun needed!
Paul – the important midpoints on this route are all ATL ex-urbia. Commuter rail is the ticket here. Not a HSR line.
Estimated 2040 ridership for the route is 13,000 trips per day – worth roughly 1/10th of a lane in each direction. Even if you piled the ridership into a few peak hours a day, you wouldn’t reach a lane’s worth. There are much more effective choices than an ATL to Chattanooga 180 mph rail line.
For roughly $2B you could build out more than a half dozen commuter rail lines from Atlanta. For a few hundred million, you could probably cover a good bit of Chattanooga with light rail.
Charles, the news item does not mention an existing Southern Crescent station at the airport, but “at the proposed airport-Southern Crescent station.”
I am interested in learning how a passenger train from the northeast to the west would be so routed in Atlanta.
@Jim – 7 hours trip time from Chattanooga TN to Destin, FL via Hwy 27-431-I-10. Came back home via I-85/75 through Atlanta – 13 hours. Atlanta truly is a transportation nightmare.
I live in Louisville but my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. spent most of their lives in Georgia. I drove from Louisville to Tampa in April 2017. The 3 hours it took me to negotiate the freeways from Marietta to Morrow, Ga. just below ATL airport were a literal nightmare. I spent the night at Morrow and discovered — to my sorrow — that “tomorrow” brought even worse as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic that stopped and started maybe a few hundred times before I got to Tampa completely exhausted many hours later. I said then I will never take that route again, finding the road via Birmingham, Montgomery, Dothan and Tallahassee more stress-free and speedier. I give this example to say that anything that can dislodge traffic on I-24 and I-75 and avoid Atlanta will be a godsend. Perhaps visionaries of the future will restore passenger routes from Chicago through Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and points south. The proposed route is a beginning point — if it happens.
Atlanta-Charlotte is the route with the greatest population at the endpoints. Plus it’s relatively level land (not mountainous like the route to Chattanooga;meaning lower construction costs. In addition, starting the line at Hartsfield airport makes no sense. The business center of metropolitan Atlanta is the northern suburbs and the Buckhead area on the city’s north side.
FRA approved the plan? Great – that’s the easy part. The hard part is getting GDOT to go along with it. They break out in hives any time someone proposes any mode of transportation that doesn’t involve concrete or asphalt.
Building such a line, while not cheap, would be of great benefit to the drivers of both Atlanta and Chattanooga. I really hope continued funding is procured for this project. Driving in the Atlanta area is a royal pain and the pay-as-you-drive HOT lanes up both I-75 and I-575 will do nothing to improve it. Building a high-speed line with a few stops between both cities, and reaching the airport in Atlanta would be huge.
The crime on MARTA is nothing compared to the number of deaths on the highway. Did you know that every hour of driving on average makes your life 20 minutes shorter (not counting the hour you just wasted looking at tail lights instead of doing something useful, which you could have been if you had taken MARTA).
Nice whitewashed stats from the AJC. Check stats from the Marta website itself. I believe, if im reading this right, 2016 saw (reported) five murders, 1 rape, 96 aggravated assaults, and 50 robberies, in addition to other simpler stuff. Trains were the highest of the incidents. Very telling that their own website, emphasis in bold letter, urges riders to protect themselves.
My big boy pants are always on, along with my big boy belt and a carry permit.
Jerry – yes. Check the crime statistics. From February 2017 AJC article “In 2015, for instance, among the four transit systems, only the Massachusetts system had a lower rate of violent crime. MARTA’s rate was about 30 per every 100,000 average daily riders the system has, the same as DC’s, while Massachusetts’ was 23. The San Francisco system, whose rider numbers are most comparable to MARTA, had a rate of 44, the AJC found.”
Put your Big Boy pants on, keep your whits about you, and MARTA is as a safe as anything else. I have used transit all over the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and South Africa, so I have lots to compare.
I live outside 285 and used MARTA everyday for several years and once a week or so after I switched to GRTA Xpress buses.
Chatt could use a commuter rail line, perhaps. But HSR won’t help.
People start throwing the word Sterotype and Racial around when truth has a bit of a sting to it. Your local media loves to report on the shootings, robberies, and murders that have occured in and around Marta stations and trains. Are you saying they have it all wrong? And like a recent meme suggests, “if the shoe fits, then lace it up and wear it.” Tired of it or not, a sterotype isnt a sterotype if its true.
As I said, thuggery aside, no-one outside of I-285 benefits from Marta trains. The rail lines don’t even reach outlying growth contributors such as Alpharetta or Kennesaw, so it has no impact on providing reliable transportation and reducing congestion in Atlanta.
Harvard, Ill is a town in the middle of the corn fields that is about the size of the fictional Mayberry of Andy Griffith fame. However, it is the western terminus for Metra on the UP-NW line that serves 80 miles and 15 stations into Chicago. So your assertion that Chattanooga doesn’t warrant a rail line because of it’s size is just plain silly.
Your shortsightedness pretty much echoes the Georgia DOT. Atlanta is completely grid-locked on a daily basis, and the best options you people can come up with are reversable road lanes that costs a billion dollars and twenty years to build, and to sit around and have fantasies about 40-lane interstates. Throw more money, pavement, and cars at the problem now instead thinking about what could be the future. A rail line to Chattanooga could be a vaible experiment for longer rail lines to other cities as well
I live in metro Atlanta, have regularly ridden MARTA, and travel through and have visited Chattanooga many times.
It’s a small city. Metro area around 1/2 million. Spartanburg + Greenville SC have population of 1.2M. You win the passenger rail game by connecting the highest population “dots”. Throw Charlotte in at the north end and you have a corridor that is more viable than Charlotte-Raleigh. If the goal is to relieve pressure on Hartsfield-Jackson, then money should go where it has the highest leverage.
Studying HSR to Chattanooga is politically motivated. The whole study got started only because of an outfit outside of Atlanta that is monkeying around with mag-lev. The original study was for a mag-lev line. This current study is just more of the typical Georgia Legislature/DOT/consultant mutual back-scratching game. They throw money around for these studies, never planning on actually funding any construction.
MARTA rail being overrun with “thugs” is an old, old, old, and often racial, stereotype. It is safe and modern and, in the last several years, reliable and clean. Avg daily ridership is over 200,000 a day, right behind PATH and SEPTA heavy rail division. When I worked in mid-town, I used MARTA a lot. I am tired of the old, false stereotype being trotted out.
If Chattanooga has a traffic problem (and it does…), the solution isn’t a HSR rail line. The money is best spent on transit and targeted highway project.
To address the possibility of an Atlanta-to-Savannah route – unlike others, I think that any alternative to more interstates and more cars is a good thing, anywhere that it is put. However, I think that a Savannah to Atlanta line would be underutilized. If you have ever driven the I-16 from Macon to Savannah, you know that that corridor barely qualifies enough traffic to warrant a two-lane Interstate Highway. It’s like driving through a desert with pine trees, and the occasional grandma driving the wrong way. There is is very little traffic at any time, and with Heart of Georgia RR taking containers from Port to central Georgia, and the soon to be opened Inland Port in Chatsworth to be served via CSX, there is really consumer or commercial traffic growth projected for that corridor. There is just not that much travel between Savannah and Macon unless there is a hurricane.
On the other hand, I-75 from Valdosta to Chattanooga, is three lane from south to north and is bumper-to-bumper traffic. If you want to go where the gazelles are, the Macon to Atlanta or Atlanta to Chattanooga would make the most sense. I’m pulling for the later.
I too dislike the “urban thuggery” stereotype Mr. Oltmann, TV news “if it bleeds it leads” really distort the true danger levels. As a longtime CTA rider and current BART rider I can personally attest to the distortion.
But I actually agree with Mr. Conaway about the utility of this proposed line (over focus on Chatt as an endpoint to the neglect of important midpoints) and the limited coverage of MARTA heavy rail. The fact that it would be integrated with Hartsfield is very important, as short-medium haul rail connections to major air terminals is also a great strategy for passenger rail (a la Brightline/Orlando).
And that’s not to neglect the eventual network effect of integration with other corridors (like the worthy I-85 Corridor to Charlotte or southeast to Savannah or extending from Chatt to Nashville). Even the ill fated Milwaukee-Madison and even Tampa-Orlando’s hIgherSR utility were questioned without consideration of the network effect of extending to MSP or connnecting to the eventual Brightline, respectively. Either intentionally or not…
Some of you I can tell are foamers who are speaking out of your arses and dont even live in the affected area, so take a hike and troll elsewhere.
Driving in Atlanta is a nightmare commute, and Marta is too short-lined and thug-infested to be of use to anyone except the closest suburbs. On the other end of it, traffic in and around Chattanooga is getting worse as the area is growing rapidly. Several passenger rail corridors, like the system Chicago has in place, would greatly benefit the area. The proposed line passes only a few miles from my house, and damn straight I would ride it if it meant never having to drive in Atlanta again.
To the person who said that Chattanooga is a nowhere destination, you obviously have never been there. The city has available river channels for barge traffic all the way to the Mississippi, and an airport that is touted as an alternative to Atlanta and travels to a lot of destinations around the U.S. As a matter of fact, there has been talk of building the “second Atlanta airport” there because it is a less congested area. In the past few years, large industries such as Volkswagon and Amazon have located their operations there.
As far as giving money to CSX to improve the NC&Stl line, that is a stupid idea. Between Chattanooga and Atlanta, it is one of curviest mainlines in the east. It would cost hundreds of millions, if not several billion, dollars just to buy the built up properties along the right of way, not to mention bridges, realignments, and tunnel improvements that would have to be made to make it viable for passenger service. A better alternative, if you wanted to partner up with a freight railroad, would be NS’s Atlanta North District.
What a waste of time and money. This will never, ever happen and makes little sense. Rail proponents should focus 100% on potential projects that have a strong logic and for which ground support can be mustered. Nobody but a few foamers cares about rail from Chattanooga to Atlanta and the capital investment to make this happen compared to the number of potential riders makes it a non-starter.
Atlanta – Chattanooga a high speed rail corridor? Georgia would do better with service between Atlanta and Savannah and or Atlanta and Charlotte, NC.
If they are successful in Florida, maybe this would be Brightline’s next gig.
It is interesting that they note the southern terminus as being at the Atlanta Airport-Southern Crescent Station. The current route of the Amtrak Crescent comes nowhere near the Atlanta Airport. In reading some of the attached information on the link to the DOT site it states that the southern terminal would connect with airlines and MARTA (the Atlanta transit authority), but no mention of Amtrak.
I suppose they could be alluding to the old days when Southern ran two trains to New Orleans, the Southerner that stayed on the Southern through Birmingham and the Crescent which left the Southern in Atlanta and ran over the A&WP/WRA/L&N through Mobile to New Orleans.
Again, the State of Tennessee needs to come forward to extend this proposed high speed rail corridor to Nashville. The largest metropolitan area in the state as well as the state capital should be part of the corridor with Atlanta and Chattanooga. A 275-mile route connecting Atlanta, Chattanooga and Nashville would further legitimise high speed rail.
Oh, brother. What a waste. Atlanta needs more transportation options, but Chattanooga is a minor destination. I-75 is crowded, but not much of it sources or sinks to the Chattanooga area. Much better “dots” to connect on I-85 to the north: Clemson/Anderson, Greenville, Spartanburg, Charlotte – and on to DC.