Response to Dispatch article

To all:

 

The Dispatch has done another hatchet job in its Oct. 24 article "Railroads weren't in on new 3C rail study." The reporter, whose beat is politics and not transportation, went into an article with a premise and disregarded much information that did not have anything to do with a premise. That's the very same thing the Dispatch accuses the Ohio Department of Transportation of doing in estimating a 50 mph average speed.

 

What it missed -- AGAIN -- was a context. Is it normal for freight railroads to be consulted at this stage of analysis? I told the reporter it was premature for the freight railroads to be involved at this stage of a rail project's development. Also I reminded him that the freight railroads have issued letters of support for the process the state is pursuing, and that Woodside Consulting is staffed by former freight railroad executives who use methodologies supported by the freight railroads. None of that made it into this cherry pickers' special.

 

The article noted the higher speed doesn't depend on different trains. So? A 50 mph average speed is in the ballpark of other states' average speeds for new train services started over the past 30 years using gleaming new trains or rebuilt 50-year-old trains -- which I told the reporter. And, saying "the higher speeds don't depend on any improvements to tracks other than the $236.2 million in upgrades that state officials outlined last year" ignores that the earlier 39 mph average speed was a baseline estimate by Amtrak which didn't account for any of these job-producing improvements to freight rail infrastructure. Their political writer did a nice job in omitting that, too.

 

Sadly, I should not be surprised the reporter excluded my qualifying remark that this project's timing will likely keep it from being in the state's next biennial budget, despite faux concerns raised by the Dispatch's conservative editorial board that it would. The reporter's condescension, referring to me as Ohio's biggest rail cheerleader (I previously worked for 15 years as a full-time reporter and shot down bad rail projects throughout my professional life), has no place in a professional, commentary-free, journalistic piece.

 

The next time you see my name in a Dispatch article, it will be accompanied only by a "no comment." I will no longer be party to their plans to destroy a crucial starting-point investment in Ohio's future, one that is so common elsewhere in its characteristics and its sponsors' approach (both of which Ohio is copying) it is sad that some still have a "blinded by the sun" response to it. I keep hoping the Dispatch will illuminate the masses rather than blind them with irrelevance. And I keep getting let down.

 

Ken Prendergast
Executive Director
All Aboard Ohio
12029 Clifton Blvd., Suite 505
Cleveland, OH 44107
(216) 288-4883
kenprendergast@allaboardohio.org
www.allaboardohio.org