Will TIGER grant produce a rail roar?

Let's think about the glamorous headlines for the moment.

"Passenger rail rises from grave in city famous for Chattanooga Choo Choo." "Passenger rail proves boon to getting tourists from airport to downtown and back." "Passenger rail becomes primary mode of transportation for Enterprise South, Southside industry."

For a city long associated with the railroad, last week's announcement that Chattanooga received a $400,000 Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study the potential of passenger rail was good news.

In many larger cities, and a handful of cities the size of Chattanooga, light rail is a convenient way for commuters to come to the central city for work and for tourists to park their car in a station lot, climb aboard and get off at nearby parks and attractions.

New York and Chicago, the country's two largest cities for many years, have had subway and rail systems for decades. They're a given way to get around there.

Other large cities, such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Francisco, have built more modest systems. They're convenient, cheap, relatively fast and reasonably comfortable. Riders in all these cities use their transportation time to listen to music, check their phones, update projects on their laptops or iPads, or just relax from a long day at work.

In Washington, D.C., on a given day, Washington Nationals baseball fans board a Metro train in Virginia and get off half a block from Nationals Park. Halfway across the country, St. Louis Cardinals baseball fans in a distant Illinois suburb hop on a MetroLink train, cross the Mississippi River and stop just west of Busch Stadium. All the way across the United States in San Francisco, an Oakland Raiders football fan can climb aboard a BART train south of San Francisco, travel under the bay and get off directly across from Oakland Coliseum.

Chattanooga has no major league professional sports teams, but it's certainly a town in which tourists and residents could take advantage of rail.

What the city has going for it already are 21 miles of freight rail. What is conceived is a 23-mile long system that would include areas such as Enterprise South, the airport, Warner Park, downtown, the Southside, Alton Park and East Lake.

Such a rail system offers the possibility of fewer cars downtown and a more pedestrian and bike-friendly central city.

The grant would go toward the $700,000 cost of the study of a passenger rail project that would cost a minimum of $35 million. The study importantly would determine the demand, route options and fares. Surely, it also would look at how often such trains would run and what sort of cars it would require.

Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke believes such services could "connect our most disadvantaged neighborhoods to jobs, classrooms, grocery stores and health care facilities." Realistically, it also will need the buy-in of, for example, more middle-class Highway 58, East Brainerd and Ooltewah residents, who might drive to Enterprise South, park their cars and be willing to take a little longer to get to work and to get back home by taking the train.

Even then, passenger rail will not pay for itself. Across the country, fares cover 13 percent of costs in Norfolk, Va., to 40 percent in Minneapolis, and all across the board. Federal transportation funds often help with initial system costs, but state and local governments also pony up.

• In Washington, the federal government has provided grants for 65 percent of the Metro system's rail and bus capital costs.

• In St. Louis, 24th Ward Alderman Scott Ogilvie complained earlier this year, "There's no funding strategy to get light rail to the location that would most benefit from it."

• In San Francisco, where 373,945 passengers rode trains every weekday in 2013, Bay Area Rapid Transit's operating loss was $240 million in 2012.

In other words, light rail is subsidized almost everywhere. The rails in place in Chattanooga and the relatively low, $35 million estimated system cost offer a promise things could be different -- or at least less subsidized -- in the Scenic City. That's what the study should tell us.

U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., said in a news release about the TIGER grant he is "confident a passenger rail option would allow us to utilize existing rail infrastructure and provide transportation options to residents throughout the city," but he declined to elaborate to this space about the general potential for passenger rail or whether the study's $700,000 cost eventually would pay off.

In theory, a rail system in a city known for railroads would be ideal. In practice, that may be a different thing.

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