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If US rail freight is so great (which I do believe it is) then get the f*ing trucks off the interstate highways! Let's load up the rail system with the freight
by lr 16y ago
If US rail freight is so great (which I do believe it is) then get the f*ing trucks off the interstate highways! Let's load up the rail system with the freight it was meant to serve. If not, then make way for the passenger trains, and the tractor trailers can have the roads, which they destroy with every wheel turn they take!
- megablast 16y agoThis was mentioned in the article. A number of trucking companies are doing this, and just using trucks for move it around locally. This has increased congestion on the railroads, and the new passneger traffic will make this even worse. It really is worth reading the article, very informative. I remember reading some ridiculous statistic about how cheap it is to move a ton of cargo in the US before, now I have a few more details.
- lr 16y agoI did read the article. :-) And absent from it is the fact that the federal government gave the railroads the land in the first place. I love The Economist, but leave it to them to bemoan regulation, but leave out a simple and fundamental fact like that. The article even mentioned how new tracks are being put in for long distance passenger traffic -- which will not impact the freight trains -- but that local traffic has to be on freight lines, and this does impact freight because of freight's erratic schedule. But perhaps with more use freight will be less erratic. Perhaps the best solution is to move freight transfer stations (where rail freight moves to trucks) out from cities, and allow passenger service closer in. This does not help freight that has to go through the city in the first place. But, if we can move off of coal a little faster, then maybe we will have the capacity for increased freight and passenger rail service.
- olefoo 16y agoYou know that sounds like a job for some simulation software, especially if you could model things like adding intermodal terminals and adding links to the network constrained by the cost of right of way. Even better if you could figure out how to model the politics and market forces, if you could come up with something that helped railway executives make better decisions about the environment they operate in (apparently they lease rights of way back and forth, and the company running the train is not necessarily the one that owns a given stretch of track), you would have a saleable product.
- BrentRitterbeck 16y agoWe have a huge number of people in this country who are unemployed. Why don't we just redirect the money we give them and their labor towards rebuilding the railroad infrastructure in this country? Seems like a perfectly acceptable use of tax payer dollars.
- jacoblyles 16y agoI don't get how the fact that the railroads were built with eminent domain a century ago should affect current policy.
- reeses 16y agoAt my last job, our average cost to transport between Baltimore and the SF Bay Area for rail vs. trucking was $3500 vs. $6500 for a single container.