Short Lines Need CRISI to Avoid a Crisis

摘要

The New Jersey School of Architecture offers a master's degree in infrastructure planning. In preparing for his course on infrastructure, Professor Alex Marshall used Google's Ngram Viewer, which can search millions of books and publications to determine when a word was first used. He found that the word "infrastructure" made its first appearance in French publications in the 1880s in conjunction with railroad engineering. Today, "infrastructure" has become the rhetorical justification for all manner of federal spending programs. Many of those programs are certainly meritorious and result in economic and societal benefits. But, in deference to infrastructure's etymology, it is worth noting the state of play with regard to federal railroad infrastructure grant programs. From the short line perspective, the most important of these is the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program. CRISI is the only federal railroad grant funding program where short line railroads are directly eligible to apply. This eliminates the inevitable delays and red tape associated with routing funds through various levels of state and local government. Since CRISI grants were first approved in 2017, 84 short lines have received more than $520 million in federal investment. These funds have been used to rehabilitate track, repair or replace aging bridges, improve grade crossings, and eliminate bottlenecks. For short lines required to meet the federal government's PTC mandate, CRISI grants made a critical contribution to costs that were otherwise out of reach for these small businesses.