Quote:
Originally Posted by instarx
But the point I was making was although it would be theoretically more efficient to ship just trailers (or containers), the trucking industry isn't set up that way. Truckers get paid by the mile so its hard to make enough money on short-hauls to survive.
|
Which is the point, isn't it? Get a well-designed & implemented rail freight system in place, and long-haul trucking (in its current form) WON'T survive, because it makes less efficient use of resources. To ship 200 containers from A to B takes 100 trucks, which means 100 times wages for drivers, 100 times diesel fuel, cost of maintaining highways (not cheap, because concrete wears a lot faster that steel rails - there are places on I80 west of here where constant truck traffic has worn ruts in the concrete so deep that I worry about high-centering the Insight on them). With an electric railroad, you pay for two engineers, use cheap electricity, a lot of which you recover through regenerative breaking on the downhills. Designing an automated rail freight depot with reasonable highway access seems like a comparatively small capital expense.