4 ms·
I hope that the "shortage" of drivers will lead companies to prefer shipping by rail, which is much less polluting, easier on the workers, and more efficient.
by CapacitorSet 8y ago
I hope that the "shortage" of drivers will lead companies to prefer shipping by rail, which is much less polluting, easier on the workers, and more efficient.
- MisterTea 8y agoI miss the days when the train delivered things to my door step.
- ocschwar 8y agoThe last time someone used an 18 wheeler to make a long haul delivery to my door step was 18 years ago. It's been small utility trucks ever since, driven on short hauls, by people who might well live walking distance to my house. A train would never deliver to my house, but to this day there are still unused train slips leading to factories around my urban area, and in Europe there are plenty of shopping malls that have a train slip as well as a truck loading bay.
- burger_moon 8y agoLTL trucking is how just about everything you buy in a store is delivered, and it you ever buy anything online that is large or heavy it is also shipped this way to your house. The UPS truck isn't delivering pallets of bananas to the grocery store.
- ocschwar 8y agoNope. But note you said pallet. Nothing stopping those pallets from making the long haul on tracks, and the last mile on a truck. (Except politics, that is)
- MisterTea 8y agoHow does the pallet make it from train to truck in a cost effective way? Adding labor into the equation is grade A bean counter kryptonite.
- ocschwar 8y agoThere is no way for it to be more cost effective to truck a load long haul than it is to pay for a forklift operator to unload your truck onto a rail car at one end of the haul and another forklift operator to do the reverse operation at the other end. The reason it isn't done this way is certainly not the amount of labor.