Let's Get Get Those Freight Trucks Off the Road and Put America Back on Tracks

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Let's Get Get Those Freight Trucks Off the Road and Put America Back on Tracks

By Philip Longman, Washington Monthly. Posted January 13, 2009.

A nineteenth-century technology could be the solution to our twenty-first-century problems.



Six days before Thanksgiving, a truck driver heading south on Interstate 81 through Shenandoah County, Virginia, ploughed his tractor trailer into a knot of cars that had slowed on the rain-slicked highway. The collision killed an eighty-year-old woman and her one- and four-year-old grandchildren, and brought traffic to a standstill along a ten-mile stretch of road for the better part of the afternoon.

It was a tragedy, but not an unusual one. Semis account for roughly one out of every four vehicles that travel through Virginia on I-81’s four lanes, the highest percentage of any interstate in the country. They’re there for a reason: I-81 traces a mostly rural route all the way from the Canadian border to Tennessee, and the cities in its path -- Syracuse, Scranton, Harrisburg, Hagerstown, and Roanoke among them -- are midsized and slow growing. This makes the highway a tempting alternative to I-95, the interstate that connects the eastern seaboard’s major metropolises, which is so beset with tolls and congestion that truckers will drive hundreds of extra miles to avoid it.

This is bad news for just about everyone. Even truckers have to deal with an increasingly overcrowded, dangerous I-81, and for motorists it’s a white-knuckle terror. Because much of the road is hilly, they find themselves repeatedly having to pass slow-moving trucks going uphill, only to see them looming large in the rearview mirror on the down grade. For years, state transportation officials have watched I-81 get pounded to pieces by tractor trailers, which are responsible for almost all non-weather-related highway wear and tear. To make matters worse, traffic is projected to rise by 67 percent in just the next ten years.

The conventional response to this problem would be simply to build more lanes. That’s what highway departments do. But at a cost of $11 billion, or $32 million per mile, Virginia cannot afford to do that without installing tolls, which might have to be set as high as 17 cents per mile for automobiles. When Virginia’s Department of Transportation proposed doing this early last year, truckers and ordinary Virginians alike set off a firestorm of protest. At the same time, just making I-81 wider without adding tolls would make its truck traffic problems worse, as still more trucks diverted from I-95 and other routes. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/119359/let%27s_get_get_those_freight_trucks_off_the_road_and_put_america_back_on_tracks/

[Wapsie B]

1. I never quite understood why there has to be so many cross country trucks

hauling freight from one end to the other. Set up regional rail terminals in a number of sections of the country and let the railroads haul it most of the way. If it's a question of freight getting to its destination on time then there may have to be a few tweaks in that system. But as it stands now it's organized chaos.

[MichellesBFF]

2. Trucks

We should have a differential speed limit, like they do in Europe. It decreases the amount of truck into car crashes.

[midnight]

3. I would love to see the R.R. infrastructure in this country

revived.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. I have been arguing for years for a modern rail system.

It saves energy, keeps those big trucks from breaking up the roads,etc., and a high-speed rail system could replace most air traffic.

80 years ago there used to be a passenger train connecting the Twin Cities with Chicago. They called it the "400" because it made the run in 400 minutes. When you figure the time you would spend treveiling to & from airports, checking and retrieving luggage, going through security etc. at both ends in order to fly from Minneaolis to Chicago, 6.5 hours from mid-city to mid-city doesn't sound like such a bad deal.

[baldguy]

5. And put how many truckers out of work?

[bluecollarcharlie]

6. Careful...

....you can't ask inconvenient questions like that. Somebody's head will explode if faced with core realities like what to do with the unemployed.

[Papagoose]

7. None.

Nobody needs to lose their job, though some drivers will need to change from being long-haul drivers to local...

I work for a logistics company that specializes in intermodal transport. What we do is pick up freight in containers that look like your everyday trailer. We carry these containers to local rail terminals, load them onto trains, transport them across the country by rail and then deliver them to the final destination from local rail terminals. Even thought he load moves primarily by rail, a truck driver is needed at both ends of the move. The truckers we work with all live and work locally and are home just about every night.

There wil always be a need for some drivers to handle long-haul over the road freight, but if we move more non time-sensitive shipments from Over The Road to Rail, we can drastically reduce the number of trucks on the road.

[Soylent Brice]

9. BINGO.

well said.

aside from the fact that your average OTR owner operators are modern day pirate/nomads, of which the majority of can't stay at a company for more than a year or two. i equate the owner operators to mercenaries. good people, just fickle.

[4dsc]

12. With less pay no doubt.

Most of the "local" truckers I run across are old OTR drivers who just want to be closer to home. But they pay the price with lower wages. While I'm all for more railroad traffic, I am not for the low wages local truck drivers get paid..

[Two Americas]

10. none

The Republicans crushed the railroads and moved freight to the highways, so they could bust the unions and have their shipping subsidized by the public. Those were good jobs that were lost, and moving the freight by rail is more energy efficient, safer, less polluting, and less disruptive to the environment.

There are always more jobs, not less, and better jobs when we do things for the benefit of the public rather than for the enrichment of the few. Always.

It is extortion to respond to every call for social improvement with fear mongering. We have caved to the wealthy and powerful few again and again and again because they told us that otherwise we would "lose jobs" and that if we gave them what they wanted it would be "good for the economy." That has always been a lie. THEY are the ones who have been destroying jobs. THEY are the ones who destroyed our economy.

[bemildred]

14. Railroad jobs used to be pretty good.

There were a lot of them too. Things you would work for. They could be that way again. And the strain is a lot less. I would bet truckers would like it, once they got adjusted. We could just move a lot of them into union railroad jobs and see how it goes.

[Soylent Brice]

8. 2 interesting things about the trucking industry...

i worked for a trucking company for a few years and when i interviewed for the job the guy told me 2 things he thought would show me how important the position was...

1. there is less railroad in use now than there was before the civil war.

2. everything you own has been touched by a truck at least 6 times.

i don't know if that last one is true, but certainly seems plausible when you think about it.

the truth of the matter is how ridiculous of a concept the trucking industry is. it epitomizes our lust relationship with excess and oil. it also explains a good deal why it will be a slow arduous process weaning ourselves towards rail again.

in either case the switch is a long overdue one.

[BirminghamExaminer]

15. It also has a whole lot to do with Detroit

Because it was American automakers that bought the trolly and street car systems in cities across the nation and then promptly dismantled them, making the options for transportation in cities very limited.

I hope that the Detroit automakers don't fail but on the other hand, maybe they should change their factories to make light rail instead. It might make up for the years of pollution and lack of transportation that they are mostly responsible for.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. Not only that: Diesel fumes are incredibly bad for

people with respiratory problems.

[elleng]

13. Here is some information about the current U.S. freight rail system.

We can discuss it later if you'd like.

http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/usa-rail-map.html

http://history.howstuffworks.com/american-history/1990s-railroads7.htm

http://www.aar.org/~/media/AAR/BackgroundPapers/145.ashx

http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Research/AcademicPublications/VoyagerRR.pdf