Fixing rail-car gridlock — one step at a time

Here's one of those things we never would have expected people to be able to quantify: According to a TxDOT study, delays at Houston rail crossings will cost us $2.6 billion over the next 20 years. "Gridlock: That's where you're headed eventually," Harris County Judge Ed Emmett told KHOU. "No question about it."

Eventually? We've already experienced gridlock trying to get across the East End some mornings, or the Union Pacific tracks on Richmond or Westheimer some afternoons. Across the Houston area, Channel 11 reports that here are about 1,200 at-grade rail crossings, and vehicles cross them around 5 million times a day. Potential gridlock? You betcha. The TxDOT report recommends as many as 55 new overpasses and underpasses to get vehicles across railroad crossings; they would cost about $808 million. Also recommended is the closure of as many as 63 grade crossings, which would cost around $5.2 million. And that's just a fraction of the total work that needs to be done, which Emmett estimated at about $4 billion.

So, will any of it be completed? Over time, yes, Emmett said: "[The $4 billion is] not going to get done, but we need to get started on it now so that we don’t look up 10 years from now and we have this city that’s just so congested with the freight rails still in it," he said.