It has more to do with the fact for once people are willing to do something about it. As is the case will most problems, people will live with them until the get bad enough, then the support comes to fix them. For an example one has to look just down the road from the CREATE project, O’Hare airport. Since the start of airlines doing a hub and spoke system, O’Hare has been the ‘hot spot’ for most major airlines. If O’Hare is having a bad day, then the rest of the air system in the country is having a bad day. Then came the summer of 2000. Know as the “summer from hell” the midwest was rocked with storms almost daily that made traffic into and out of O’Hare a joke. From these problems came major support for a expansion and reconfiguration of the airport. If the summer of 2000 had not been as bad as it was, my opinion is that the support would be lacking for the work. CREATE is very similar.
If you start with the answer you like, rephrase the question and then align only those supporting facts that fit the line between your question and your answer, you get…
A comment from a former traffic officer of the UP, a primary author of the original studies leading to the “Alameda Corridor” in a recent comment on the topic of import intermodal and a strategy BNSF might profitably adopt:
“Step one: [BNSF should] Raise the rates, make some money (for a change). Set rates whereby all service types are profitable, no cross-subsidization. If we dump low-rate traffic and the UP takes it, fine. They will run out of capacity too. And the surplus traffic will come back to us at a higher rate. And by the way, set unequal rates on EB traffic from the West Coast ports so as to force the steamship lines to better balance the traffic tendered in the PNW with that tendered in LA/LB.”
Cross subsidization is and has been a recognized problem in this industry for decades, and is particularly acute regarding import intermodal. I understand that the poster has “yet to be shown” anything on the topic. That condition is probably permanent. Cross-subsidization is, among other things, an econometric tool as well as a “condition” of pricing. There can be advantages as well as disadvantages to cross-subsidization.
Dave’s sarcasm wore very thin on me hundreds of posts ago, having become one of his targets since I don’t subscribe to his particular worldview. Rather than attempt a rational presentation of why we should agree with him, he chooses to denigrate those who disagree.