Posted: Jan 24, 2020 11:45 am
Macdoc wrote:Now admittedly Australia and Canada might be special cases for rail due to size and low density but in our cases we use ships right to center of the continent via both St Lawrence Seaway and the US uses the Mississipi and the Ohio Valley amongst other waterways.
Despite having full duplex rail and an ocean going waterway right beside it, the 401 between Windsor and Montreal is the busiest commercial highway in North America as flexibility is key.
A reminder of what I was replying to seems in order.
The_Metatron wrote:The transportation model of long haul trucking needs to be made extinct. Rails.
In that context, population density, freight costs per weight and distance are simply lower for rail, no matter whether we are talking about a standard shipping container filled with 22 tons of apples or 22 tons of express freight parcels and regardless of whether the container is loaded in Sydney and unloaded in Perth or Stuttgart and Frankfurt.
The main hurdle for rail freight is that the road transport industry does not pay for the existence and maintenance of the hugely expensive infrastructure that has been built for many decades now. I am referring to the construction of multilane dual-carriageways, also known as freeways, expressways, autobahnen, autostrada, et cetera. No road taxes come near covering it. This is known as an external expense. In percentage terms the road freight industry pays next to nothing for that. The necessary funds come out of general tax revenue. In most countries that means the personal income tax paid by wage earners.
In contrast, construction of the requisite rail infrastructure has been neglected ever since the fossil fuel industry and carmakers have hijacked transport infrastructure policies almost a century ago. Ironically, this is changing now - albeit gradually. Major road freight companies increasingly push for, and invest in rail because it makes economic sense. It also gives them a competitive advantage over those who do not. Intermodal is the way of the future. The glory days of linehaul are numbered. Driverless tractor-trailer combinations won't bring them back.