Connectivity rules

The time is now: We need an Oklahoma City/Tulsa rail nexus

Sometimes opportunity comes in a once-in-a-lifetime package: a door opens, or at least hangs ajar and beckons entry. Tulsa is on the cusp of one of these moments. While it may seem hyperbolic, it’s all about a train – or, more precisely, about a rail line, one that would link us with our down-the-highway peers in OKC. The notion, in a nutshell, is to spark a larger, more animated, “co-prosperity” locus that could benefit both cities.

We should seize the day. But some of us are beginning to think that hyper-cautious impulses at City Hall, medieval nonsense in the state legislature, and a retrograde attitude in the state transportation bureaucracy will forestall this radiant opportunity.

Rail builds community

I recently saw the strange but fascinating 2004 film “Polar Express.” 

While the film uses an early, somewhat creepy version of “performance animation” and is centered on a spookily animated conductor who looks incredibly like Tom Hanks, we could argue that the main character in the film is actually a passenger train.

“Polar” is a children’s classic, like the award-winning book on which it’s based. But the flick is also a rapturous meditation on the power of passenger trains to bring communities together; in this case, it’s the planet’s children and a wildly re-imagined rendition of Santa’s headquarters at the North Pole. The movie is, in every sense of the word, a “transport.”

In our new century, rail correlates tightly with exceptional start-up rates, elevated job growth, and vibrant futures. There’s the “BosWash,” the epic Boston-Washington tech/Fed corridor that is, according to urban-development pro Richard Florida, a stark instance. Our auto centric society has, in most areas of America, spurned rail/transit for personal vehicles, highways, and commercial aviation. But, as The New York Times highlighted in an article earlier this month, a new study from the American Public Transportation Association claims that more Americans used buses, trains, and subways in 2013 than any year since 1956. New-wave passenger rail has the potential to augment our digital-communications revolution, and the car, together with the magic of quick, inexpensive, rail range, meetings and market-enlarging gigs for musicians, small businesses, artists, entrepreneurs, and others, especially in midsized “sister” cities like Tulsa and Oklahoma City, become all the more possible. 

Oklahoma was once the site of some of the heaviest rail use in America. It was the early 20th century, at the onset of the great oil boom, and a surge in population and land-area growth in Tulsa and surrounding communities. The question: will Oklahoma join this resurgence of passenger rail?

Rail sparks innovation

Atlantic Cities, a special supplement to The Atlantic, examined recently how new rail might affect economic growth in smaller, northeastern cities between New York and Boston. The publication concluded, “by shrinking the distance between vibrant urban cores and the smaller communities that lie between them, high-speed rail could spark an economic boom, transforming the cities it touches. In the nineteenth century, railroads conferred a key advantage on cities competing for economic growth. In the twenty-first century, they may play that role yet again.”

One of the most salient urban-policy and land-use think tanks, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in a 2008 analysis conducted with New York’s Regional Plan Association, described the dynamic: “Decades of international experience with high-speed rail suggests that it could create similar transportation, economic, environmental, and safety benefits in American cities and regions. While it requires high upfront investment, high-speed rail promotes economic growth by improving market access, boosting productivity of knowledge workers, expanding labor markets, and attracting visitor spending. When planned thoughtfully with complementary investments in the public realm, high-speed rail can promote urban regeneration and attract commercial development, as shown in several European examples. High-speed rail has greater operating energy efficiency than competing modes and takes up less land than highways.”

Some area transit advocates say that it doesn’t matter how we link Tulsa and Oklahoma City. A rail link, initially a light, modest-speed line, would be a magic nexus, no matter how it gets done. It seems natural to expect that a private/public partnership would advance the project, but Oklahoma politicians don’t seem to understand that a huge corpus of the economic history of the United States is a consequence of epic, largely successful partnerships between government and private entities. (Two examples: Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway project and the huge, integrated-circuit gambit for the U.S. Intercontinental ballistic missile effort that sparked the PC revolution, the commercial Internet, and the telecom mobility transformation.)

What stands in the way

Like most American states, Oklahoma has a state transportation department, a giant operation that is responsible for helping towns and localities with highway development and execution, bus transit, light rail, and every manner of transportation, including the shepherding of hundreds of millions in federal funds.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation is one of the most powerful and well-funded entities in state government, administering and estimated $1 billion as of last year. The state transportation department and its many finance “helper boards” and collaborative commissions have issued a bid which, on its face, is designed to sell a 97.5-mile rail link. Stillwater Central, an entity that, together with Iowa Pacific, has agreed to explore the prospect of operating a passenger rail line between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, currently leases the state-owned line. The state department of transportation and its advisor cadre is currently deciding whether not to sell the link to one of several private entities that have bid on the same, including several prominent players in the use of rail for industrial cargo transport.

The interest in rail in America’s fossil-fuel industry is incredible because of its capacity to inexpensively convey coal, oil, and liquid natural gas. The interest is far from evil, but the role of the state transportation department is to balance public interests with private needs and a larger developmental agenda for the people of the state. This role ought to be a nuanced one, one made simpler when the wishes of large numbers of people in Oklahoma City and in Tulsa is manifested in decisions from both city councils and by numerous communities along the path. All have made clear to the transportation department and to much of Oklahoma’s political establishment that the “Sooner Sub” line should be held in public trust and that aggressive effort should be made to use it to establish passenger rail between Oklahoma’s two largest cities.

A test trip designed to weigh public interest in a permanent, multi-run, daily passenger train sped out of Tulsa in February. Hundreds made the trip. The response was incredible.

Oklahoma planning and transit advocates, including this writer, are calling for scrapping the bids and returning to the multi-year lease currently held by Stillwater Central, the strategic party that, together with Iowa Pacific, could, with help from other private players, and some aid from the feds and local governments, bring about an OKC/Tulsa rail service, complete with all of the transformative yields for the people of both communities.