Use of Passenger Rail Infrastructure for Goods Movement Economic Feasibility Study from California’s San Francisco Bay Area

freight service is reinvested in passenger service improvements. The freight carrier, in shifting goods from trucks to rail, can potentially benefit from (a) more reliable travel times for goods, particularly during periods of nonrecurrent congestion, (b) cheaper transport costs, and (c) fewer truck accidents. Society may benefit from reduced truck traffic through reductions in (a) harmful greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, (b) truck-induced delays, (c) road maintenance costs, and (d) other negative externalities such as noise and truck-related accidents. This feasibility study explores the use of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system for transport of FedEx Express air cargo. The economic feasibility of such a system is presented from a purely operational perspective. A later report will include the required capital costs, but for the purposes of this paper, capital investments are considered sunk costs. The motivation for doing so is methodological; if mixed-goods service is found to be fiscally infeasible from an operational perspective, then there is no need to examine the required capital expenditure. The paper is structured as follows. The first section describes the critical characteristics of the system under analysis. The next section outlines the assumptions and methodology of the economic feasibility model. The model examines three different operational scenarios: the status quo of truck-only transport, an alternative requiring minor capital expenditure (Alternative A), and an alternative requiring significant capital expenditure (Alternative B). The final sections discuss the quantitative results of the economic feasibility study and describe how this type of service might be further investigated.