7 ms·

Yes, on the contrary, if the labor market wasn't tight, there would be little investment in automated trucks in the first place. But if we were really serious

Yes, on the contrary, if the labor market wasn't tight, there would be little investment in automated trucks in the first place. But if we were really serious about the driver shortage and freight bottleneck issues, we would simply build more rail. We've had (basically) driverless trucks before the driverful kind! The fact that investors flock to AI hail maries and not tried-and-proven infrastructure demonstrates the limitation of the demand on one hand, and asset bubble in tech on the other.

xyzzyz 5y ago
You don’t “simply” build new rail in America. Nothing is simple about constructing new rail.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  Curiosity, not challenge: why not? Political issues, engineering issues, both, or other?
  - breckenedge 5y ago
    Economics too. Rail mostly already exists where it can sustain itself, the rest of the country is just not dense enough.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      So an enlightened Fordist shipping conglomerate would try to densify urban cores, where it is most efficient to get people their cheap stuff.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      No, it's because rail doesn't get the massive subsidies that roads do. Roads are artificially cheap to use, especially for trucking that does the majority of the damage and pay minimal road fees, while rail has to pay for itself. It is very hard for rail, passenger or freight, to compete with the largess of federal tax dollars for road usage. If road fees were matched to the actual cost of road maintenance, like they are with rail, a lot of freight would shift over to barge and train overnight. Simply put, railways are much more efficient between two fixed points than roads. They require much less fuel per ton, and they require much less labor, land, and capital equipment per person mile or ton mile. If the costs were properly priced in, consumers of various different types would strongly prefer rail for transit between fixed points (e.g. city to city). But currently the inefficiency of road usage is paid for by the federal government. The density argument is massively overstated. Ohio has roughly the same density as France 282/mi^2 vs. 269/mi^2, and it's not even our most dense state. The fact that states like Ohio don't have anywhere close to the rail network that France has is a consequence of political decisions, not economics or the built environment.
      - xyzzyz 5y ago
        We are talking about freight rail here. Ohio already has more intrastate freight volume than France, and that’s only a small fraction of the remainder of inbound, outbound, or freight traffic passing through. It is France that would need to seriously shape up if it is to keep up with Ohio. Alas, it will not do so, because rail freight volumes in France have fallen by almost half over last 20 years, as France is moving away from rail to road freight. Don’t project differences between passenger rail systems to freight rail. It is by all means clear that US has the best freight rail system in the world.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        This is completely irrelevant to the point I was making: arguments about how America "isn't dense enough" for rail is ignoring the fact that America actually is quite dense ... where Americans actually live. Our tenth densest state is denser than a country famous for its usage of high speed rail for passenger transit. Any difference in infrastructure is down to political choices, not density.
      - breckenedge 5y ago
        Thanks for the info. It seems that Ohio is an outlier in being the largest U.S. state without a publicly funded rail system [1], which is unfortunate. I concede that the rail system in Ohio suffers from a lack of funding that the road system enjoys. I blame the politicians. [1] http://allaboardohio.org/ http://allaboardohio.org/
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  It's very enshrined in eminent domain. It is not adequately discussed how a sort of NIMBYism holds back growth on macro scale things.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  And yet we "simply" build new highways all the time, which consume a lot more land than railways do.
  - readams 5y ago
    Do you have an example of a new highway built recently?
    - ericmay 5y ago
      Eh it’s not just construction of entirely new highways but highway expansion. Plenty of examples of this.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Expansion doesn't take land if the state already had reserved that land for itself. Many highways have huge rights of way beside them because the state had grand plans for expansion when they were built in the 50s-70s.
        ericmay 5y ago
        Which is kind of like an accounting trick. The state already has the land, run a rail line through it instead of expanding it, etc. But ultimately the expansion of the highways has downstream effects - state will buy new land, build new roads, etc. as density flows out. If you have a two lane highway going into a city and it's congested, and then you expand it, more people move out of the city or more further away - obviously someone is building new roads or expanding existing ones as that occurs.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      According to the Bureau of Transport Statistics the US highway system went from 4,050,717 miles in 2009 to 4,171,125 miles in 2019. This is a delta 120,408 miles, or an increase of 2.9%. This is system miles, not even lane miles, so it will not include highway expansion. Actually correlating this down to individual routes in an exhausting endeavor, given all the places these could be recorded. But I found that we did designate 7 new highways in the past 10 years, including I-14, I-11, I-87, I-41, I-42, I-2, and I-22.
vorpalhex 5y ago
Can't do rail for last mile, and installing rail to every small town is mind boggingly expensive and impractical.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  We are a very, very long way away from the point where shipping by rail gets hard due to last mile problems. Currently we're shipping tons of stuff cross country in trucks.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wonderwonder 5y ago
    Think its the opposite, appears its the first mile problem. Its cheaper to just load it onto a truck at the source and drive it across country rather than loading on a truck, drive it to the rail and reload it and then unload it back onto a truck and drive it the last mile.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      That inconvenience seems like it could be resolved with containerization, only at a smaller scale than the current 40-foot containers. Small standardized containers could be rapidly transferred between truck and train.
      - toast0 5y ago
        20 foot (nominal) containers are standardized and common. On rail, they usually put two on one car; I'm not sure if that's done with the same type car that takes a aingle 40 ft, or if they're different cars.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        That unfortunately is under loading the car by quite a bit. Semi truck trailers are limited to 80,000lbs, including the trailer itself. Rail cars are usually rated for much more, the Union Pacific will accept up to 268,000 lbs including the car itself. Loading two tractor containers on a rail car is leaving ~100,000 lbs of cargo capacity on the table, so to speak.
nl 5y ago
> investors flock to AI hail maries and not tried-and-proven infrastructure demonstrates the limitation of the demand on one hand, and asset bubble in tech on the other. Not at all. VC investors flock to Hail Marys because industry disruption makes outsized returns (which is their investment thesis). Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love infrastructure projects.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love diversified protfolios. FTFY. Nobody is doing infra at scale in the private sector. Part of the reason I is lied -- it is risky not because it won't work, but simply because of the shear amount of upfront cost and duration of construction up front. Of course, safe investor flocking to indexes of existing things does not missing big infra investment make.
chrononaut 5y ago
> Yes, on the contrary, if the labor market wasn't tight, there would be little investment in automated trucks in the first place. If automated trucks result in a lower capital and operational cost on behalf of the business, even with an ample supply of qualified truckers, why wouldn't that necessitate investment in that space?
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  They rather take the risk of unproven tech if it means they need to invest less, than go with the more expensive but proven option. Keeping in mind the relationship between liquidity and risk, this shows they don't need new capacity too soon/desperately. Also keep in mind things like making delivery cheaper in city than suburbans. There's lots of small cheap (in terms of investment, if not revenue hit) ways to make things more efficient. In that case, the fact that they rather make shipping rates artificially flat for appearance's sake says something about the long-term large-scale laxity of the economy, these recent specific bottlenecks not withstanding.
- lazide 5y ago
  Because the odds of automated trucks costing less from a capital perspective are near zero, and operational costs are highly correlated with labor costs - if truckers are cheap, no one is likely to bother with maintaining and keeping likely fussy self driving vehicles operating
- adrianN 5y ago
  That is a relatively big if. It is possible that R&D and the cost of the hardware needed for autonomous driving amortize to a bigger value than just paying some person minimum wage to drive the truck.
  - slt2021 5y ago
    some truckers I know of earn 6 figures, they are definitely not minimum wage earners. Plus many of them are self-employed and pay very little to no tax
pg_bot 5y ago
Or we could get rid of the Jones act and just move freight by ship instead of driving it long distances.
- inetknght 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? What is the Jones act and how do you move freight by ship across a continental land mass?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thirtyseven 5y ago
    The Jones act restricts ship traffic between US ports solely to US-flagged vessels dramatically reducing competition and increasing costs, and you move freight by ship across a continent with rivers and canals
    - lazide 5y ago
      Is anyone really going to move coal by barge via the Mississippi on a foreign flagged vessel if the Jones act didn’t exist? And if so, how could that be cheaper unless they were cutting scary amounts of corners no sane person would want them to cut?
      - buffet_overflow 5y ago
        >unless they were cutting scary amounts of corners no sane person would want them to cut? This doesn't stop nearly as many people/companies as much as I wish it would.
      - true_religion 5y ago
        I think the issue is more that you can’t ship between Florida and New York either with a foreign ship. This prevents someone from say dropping off all their goods in Miami, then letting a British liner pick them up later and drop half off in NYC, and the other half in London. Instead you have to either ship it yourself to NYC and Miami, or you have to send it by train to NYC from Miami.
DeRock 5y ago
The cost of roads and their maintenance is externalized to the taxpayer, whereas rail requires more fully internalizing the infrastructure costs. Road damage scales with something like axle weight to the 4th(!!) power: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

xyzzyz 5y ago

You don’t “simply” build new rail in America. Nothing is simple about constructing new rail.

JadeNB 5y ago
Curiosity, not challenge: why not? Political issues, engineering issues, both, or other?
- breckenedge 5y ago
  Economics too. Rail mostly already exists where it can sustain itself, the rest of the country is just not dense enough.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    So an enlightened Fordist shipping conglomerate would try to densify urban cores, where it is most efficient to get people their cheap stuff.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    No, it's because rail doesn't get the massive subsidies that roads do. Roads are artificially cheap to use, especially for trucking that does the majority of the damage and pay minimal road fees, while rail has to pay for itself. It is very hard for rail, passenger or freight, to compete with the largess of federal tax dollars for road usage. If road fees were matched to the actual cost of road maintenance, like they are with rail, a lot of freight would shift over to barge and train overnight. Simply put, railways are much more efficient between two fixed points than roads. They require much less fuel per ton, and they require much less labor, land, and capital equipment per person mile or ton mile. If the costs were properly priced in, consumers of various different types would strongly prefer rail for transit between fixed points (e.g. city to city). But currently the inefficiency of road usage is paid for by the federal government. The density argument is massively overstated. Ohio has roughly the same density as France 282/mi^2 vs. 269/mi^2, and it's not even our most dense state. The fact that states like Ohio don't have anywhere close to the rail network that France has is a consequence of political decisions, not economics or the built environment.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      We are talking about freight rail here. Ohio already has more intrastate freight volume than France, and that’s only a small fraction of the remainder of inbound, outbound, or freight traffic passing through. It is France that would need to seriously shape up if it is to keep up with Ohio. Alas, it will not do so, because rail freight volumes in France have fallen by almost half over last 20 years, as France is moving away from rail to road freight. Don’t project differences between passenger rail systems to freight rail. It is by all means clear that US has the best freight rail system in the world.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        This is completely irrelevant to the point I was making: arguments about how America "isn't dense enough" for rail is ignoring the fact that America actually is quite dense ... where Americans actually live. Our tenth densest state is denser than a country famous for its usage of high speed rail for passenger transit. Any difference in infrastructure is down to political choices, not density.
    - breckenedge 5y ago
      Thanks for the info. It seems that Ohio is an outlier in being the largest U.S. state without a publicly funded rail system [1], which is unfortunate. I concede that the rail system in Ohio suffers from a lack of funding that the road system enjoys. I blame the politicians. [1] http://allaboardohio.org/ http://allaboardohio.org/
Ericson2314 5y ago
It's very enshrined in eminent domain. It is not adequately discussed how a sort of NIMBYism holds back growth on macro scale things.
ashtonkem 5y ago
And yet we "simply" build new highways all the time, which consume a lot more land than railways do.
- readams 5y ago
  Do you have an example of a new highway built recently?
  - ericmay 5y ago
    Eh it’s not just construction of entirely new highways but highway expansion. Plenty of examples of this.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Expansion doesn't take land if the state already had reserved that land for itself. Many highways have huge rights of way beside them because the state had grand plans for expansion when they were built in the 50s-70s.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        Which is kind of like an accounting trick. The state already has the land, run a rail line through it instead of expanding it, etc. But ultimately the expansion of the highways has downstream effects - state will buy new land, build new roads, etc. as density flows out. If you have a two lane highway going into a city and it's congested, and then you expand it, more people move out of the city or more further away - obviously someone is building new roads or expanding existing ones as that occurs.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    According to the Bureau of Transport Statistics the US highway system went from 4,050,717 miles in 2009 to 4,171,125 miles in 2019. This is a delta 120,408 miles, or an increase of 2.9%. This is system miles, not even lane miles, so it will not include highway expansion. Actually correlating this down to individual routes in an exhausting endeavor, given all the places these could be recorded. But I found that we did designate 7 new highways in the past 10 years, including I-14, I-11, I-87, I-41, I-42, I-2, and I-22.

vorpalhex 5y ago

Can't do rail for last mile, and installing rail to every small town is mind boggingly expensive and impractical.

ashtonkem 5y ago
We are a very, very long way away from the point where shipping by rail gets hard due to last mile problems. Currently we're shipping tons of stuff cross country in trucks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  Think its the opposite, appears its the first mile problem. Its cheaper to just load it onto a truck at the source and drive it across country rather than loading on a truck, drive it to the rail and reload it and then unload it back onto a truck and drive it the last mile.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    That inconvenience seems like it could be resolved with containerization, only at a smaller scale than the current 40-foot containers. Small standardized containers could be rapidly transferred between truck and train.
    - toast0 5y ago
      20 foot (nominal) containers are standardized and common. On rail, they usually put two on one car; I'm not sure if that's done with the same type car that takes a aingle 40 ft, or if they're different cars.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        That unfortunately is under loading the car by quite a bit. Semi truck trailers are limited to 80,000lbs, including the trailer itself. Rail cars are usually rated for much more, the Union Pacific will accept up to 268,000 lbs including the car itself. Loading two tractor containers on a rail car is leaving ~100,000 lbs of cargo capacity on the table, so to speak.

nl 5y ago

> investors flock to AI hail maries and not tried-and-proven infrastructure demonstrates the limitation of the demand on one hand, and asset bubble in tech on the other. Not at all. VC investors flock to Hail Marys because industry disruption makes outsized returns (which is their investment thesis). Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love infrastructure projects.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love diversified protfolios. FTFY. Nobody is doing infra at scale in the private sector. Part of the reason I is lied -- it is risky not because it won't work, but simply because of the shear amount of upfront cost and duration of construction up front. Of course, safe investor flocking to indexes of existing things does not missing big infra investment make.

chrononaut 5y ago

> Yes, on the contrary, if the labor market wasn't tight, there would be little investment in automated trucks in the first place. If automated trucks result in a lower capital and operational cost on behalf of the business, even with an ample supply of qualified truckers, why wouldn't that necessitate investment in that space?

Ericson2314 5y ago
They rather take the risk of unproven tech if it means they need to invest less, than go with the more expensive but proven option. Keeping in mind the relationship between liquidity and risk, this shows they don't need new capacity too soon/desperately. Also keep in mind things like making delivery cheaper in city than suburbans. There's lots of small cheap (in terms of investment, if not revenue hit) ways to make things more efficient. In that case, the fact that they rather make shipping rates artificially flat for appearance's sake says something about the long-term large-scale laxity of the economy, these recent specific bottlenecks not withstanding.
lazide 5y ago
Because the odds of automated trucks costing less from a capital perspective are near zero, and operational costs are highly correlated with labor costs - if truckers are cheap, no one is likely to bother with maintaining and keeping likely fussy self driving vehicles operating
adrianN 5y ago
That is a relatively big if. It is possible that R&D and the cost of the hardware needed for autonomous driving amortize to a bigger value than just paying some person minimum wage to drive the truck.
- slt2021 5y ago
  some truckers I know of earn 6 figures, they are definitely not minimum wage earners. Plus many of them are self-employed and pay very little to no tax

pg_bot 5y ago

Or we could get rid of the Jones act and just move freight by ship instead of driving it long distances.

inetknght 5y ago
Can you elaborate? What is the Jones act and how do you move freight by ship across a continental land mass?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thirtyseven 5y ago
  The Jones act restricts ship traffic between US ports solely to US-flagged vessels dramatically reducing competition and increasing costs, and you move freight by ship across a continent with rivers and canals
  - lazide 5y ago
    Is anyone really going to move coal by barge via the Mississippi on a foreign flagged vessel if the Jones act didn’t exist? And if so, how could that be cheaper unless they were cutting scary amounts of corners no sane person would want them to cut?
    - buffet_overflow 5y ago
      >unless they were cutting scary amounts of corners no sane person would want them to cut? This doesn't stop nearly as many people/companies as much as I wish it would.
    - true_religion 5y ago
      I think the issue is more that you can’t ship between Florida and New York either with a foreign ship. This prevents someone from say dropping off all their goods in Miami, then letting a British liner pick them up later and drop half off in NYC, and the other half in London. Instead you have to either ship it yourself to NYC and Miami, or you have to send it by train to NYC from Miami.

DeRock 5y ago

The cost of roads and their maintenance is externalized to the taxpayer, whereas rail requires more fully internalizing the infrastructure costs. Road damage scales with something like axle weight to the 4th(!!) power: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...