Do you actually think that the people who decide on the mode to use for transport of the goods for which they are repsponsible are willing to pick up any share of the half trillion dollars in added transportation cost? Those who decide to use rail service usually consider their total distribution cost including the impact of a somewhat lower level of service. Further, their analysis does not include the public costs for any mode. A good part of the $500 billion added infrastructure cost will go for adding highway lanes. Who is going to pay for that? People go berserk over the idea of adding 1 cent to the gas tax and that penny would only add 1.3 billion per year to the highway trust fund.&nbs
I merely trying to state that it is exceptionally hard to make a convincing agrument when there is little information to go off of when it comes to anaylizing just how much rail plays a role in our lives. If the railroad haul 30,000 trailers/containers a day & there are 5 million registared trailers in the country (I know they are not all being used) it is hard to make a convincing argument as to what benefits intermodal has.
Not to mention the attitude of the country is adding more jobs when adding highway lanes and trucking empolys more individuals. There are continued arguements that trucks are becoming as fuel effieicent as trains, app
One reason this question seems so difficult to answer is that the overall statistics are probably derived from individual carrier’s data, and the overall numbers are only as good as the input numbers. So, it’s well to ask what data the carriers represented in this report are required to report to the agencies that publish these statistics (or to agencies which get the data and then make it available to the agencies that compel the overall statistics) . Class I railroad statistics should be pretty good, because Class I roads are required to submit detailed reports to STB. But other railroads are not subject to such detailed reporting requirements. I believe the same is true of motor carriers. So, it seems to me that there’s a really good question of where the data represented by these reports is coming from, and how reliable it is.
All this said, “tons” is not a good measure of transportation market share. As others have pointed out, some “tons” are only transported a very short distance while other “tons” are transported across country. Obviously, the amount of “transportation output” represented by the cross country move is greater than the amount of transportation output for a 1-mile move in a city. Also, “tons” will result in a double count of total transportation output for moves in which more than one mode is involved. If you are looking to relative market share based on transpoortation output, you have to look at how much is transported and how far it moves. “Ton miles” is a much better measure for this purpose.
It’s is more than just a matter of time, it is a huge public investment.
Even with increasing truckload weights and the authorization of doubles, triples or truck trains, I really doubt that the economics of over the road motor carrier service would improve to the point that the service could over come the $500 billion cost disadvantage to rail service. Without an economic benefit, how are you going to get shippers to abandon rail service?
Even assuming I am wrong, and trucking service could be designed to beat rail costs and rates, there is the issue of the need for more highway infrastructure. We are aready falling behind on the upkeep of the existing infrastructure and doubling the number of trucks on the road would present a need for hundreds of billion dollars of additional public funds for expansion of the highway system. Do you really think that the American public would be in the mood to spend that kind of money for what would be percieved as just a big windfall for trucking companies? And producing jobs? The convential wisdom is that government public works expenditures either don’t produce jobs, or they aren’t “good” jobs, or no matter, the country can’t afford the expenditure.
Falcon48:
It is really hard to convince me how “tons” is not a good measurement of market share. Even if it is a load of fruit from the country to the city, that shipper has the choice between either a truck or a train.
What makes this so difficult is details. As far as I know, there is not reliable information to answer the question of how my T.V. got to walmart. I know the walmart truck got it to the store from the warehouse and another truck brought a container to the warehouse; was that an international container that was on a train or a truck that came straight from the port? Was it a port on the east or west coast?
jeaton:
It all depends what laws and regulations get passed and how the public is convinced when it comes to investing in infrastructure. Would the public be more for spending taxes dollars so trucks would have dedicated lanes? This would have no effect at the local level but neither would investment in rail either; you still have that truck operating near the originating and terminating locations either way.
When it comes to jobs I more thinking along the the lines of how many more trucking related jobs would be created if we chose to invest more in highway infrastructure vs. private-state partnerships with the railroads. Railroad can not compete very well with Just in time freight (at least not with the current infrastructure and operations) not to mention the public mentality of why invest in something that has limited reach when we could simply perfect the current system? How far down the road are self driving trucks or kind of highway PTC to have better control of vehicles and avoid accidents and congestion?
Will railroads actually be able to compete in another 50 years?
I do not know, I am just trying to understand how the railroads are going to stay competitive (especially on the intermodal front) and the only way I can see it happening is if with do what the Swedish do and start controlling how freight is moved in
The reason “tons” transported is not a good measure of market share is because “tons” transported is not a good meaure of transport output. There’s a lot more transport output represented in moving a “ton” of freight 2,000 mile across country than moving it 5 miles across town.
A more basic problem is that “market share” has to be measured against a logical transportation “market”. There is not one transportation “market” in this country. Rather, there are a lot of separate transportation markets. Gross modal “market shares” based on some measure of total national transportation output (assuming reliable data is even available) are, to my mind, not very useful. The “market” for a short intra-city move is not the same as the “market” for a trancontinental move, and the carriers involved in the two moves are not likely in competition with each other for the services involved. You really need to know data as to more discrete markets, or logical groups of markets, and then develop a “bottoms-up” analysis of total market shares based on this data to get a useful picture. Basing “market share” on gross national numbers is a pointless exercise.
Pretty much what I thought. Not to mention the figures given by Railway Man does not describe in great detail just how much interaction is done between truck - rail. Pretty much anything rail hauls is going to be involved with a truck at some point. I do not know if that truck-rail interaction figure is just strictly intermodal or not but it makes the most sense that it is.
So essentually it is safe to say that rail hauls the most freight in this country when using the ton-mile figure?
Now I am curious as to whether or not the current figure of 40% that rail has will grow
Rail share among common carriers: 40+% of the ton-miles, 10% of the revenue.### Truck share among common carriers: 40+% of the ton-miles, 82% of revenue.#### Pipelines, barge lines, and air freight companies share the remainder.
Discussion: The figures I’m quoting above are a few years old, but they’re within the ballpark. They do not include small originating moves such as from a farmer’s harvest to a grain elevator. I doubt too that they include such cross-town rubber-tire moves of trailers and containers at New Orleans, Memphis, Saint Louis and Chicago between the eastern Class 1s (CSXT and NS) and the western Class 1s (BNSF and UP).
Something else that skews the figures are fuel cost adjustment charges. They raise faster among truckers than they do within the railroad industry. That might give the truckers an edge on the revenue side.
Between rising fuel prices that impact the truckers more severely, and with a greater emphisis for on-time / on-plan performance among the rail carriers, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that both of the figures appearing above may actually be two or three percent higher.
Then what kind of hauls are actually counted when it comes to the trucking figure?
I am just a little confused. To not include a cross town move in those figures makes as much sense as not counting a terminal railroad moving a car from a small rail yard to an industry a mile away.
You can answer your questions by reading the document I linked previously. http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics
All of your questions are either addressed within this document or within the documents that are referenced within it. Look at the appendices and it references the documents (all public!) that describe how the measurements are made. Because freight systems are complicated the measurements are complicated too. It doesn’t reduce to single sentence sound bites.
RWM
Yes…That’s a no-brainer. The reason being, railroads adapt. The rail system we have today is different than it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago. What would make you think railroads wouldn’t continue adapting to the market? It’s the most cost efficient way to move tons of goods over long distances. I don’t see that changing.
I must have missed it. My bad.
Well see that is the thing. With Coal being a major source of income, what is going to happen when hauling coal is going to be reduce to near nothing? It may be the best way to haul tons of goods over long distances, but when you have little money to do so, what happens then? Are businesses going to locate closer to their distributors or are they going to centralize their operations closer to rail?
I mean how far off are we from that nation wide Conrail that was played with in the September issue of Trains?
I think you’re taking something really complicated and trying to understand it in simplistic terms. Life isn’t that simple. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Coal traffic, even if it ends, won’t end ovenight. It would happen over dozens of years, or longer. That would give the railroads dozens of years or longer to adapt. It’s happened before… For example, livestock, coal for home heating, and inter-city passengers are categories that faded out. The railroads adapted. I don’t see any reason to believe they wouldn’t in the future.
***The neat thing about railroads, is that they’re always changing, adapting to the changing world around them- for better or worse. That’s why railroad history has such a fascination to me.
Perhaps then being the low-cost carrier becomes even more important, when there’s not a lot of money to waste on ‘next-day delivery’ unless absolutely necessary.
I can see both of the trends that you mention happening. But rail and logistics technology is not static, and it’s nowhere near as wide usage or as effective as it could be. Piggyback/ TOFC wasn’t widespread until the 1960’s, double-stack until the 1980’s, and I think we have a long ways to go with domestic intermodal - esp. containers, but perhaps also trailers, RoadRailers, etc. - until we can conclude that all of the markets, niches, and opportunities have been fully served/ exploited/ utilized. Change is driven by need - “Necessity is the mother of invention”, or more properly, “implementation” in this context - but “Change is hard”, and often slow, as it also needs innovative people and organizations - and usually some capital, too - functioning as midwives to help the process along.
- Paul North.
I understand coal will not just disappear overnight, and I think it is safe to say that railroads are taking steps to build the foundation for relying on intermodal as their main source of revenue, but even that is up in the air.
Paul is right that intermodal has a long way to go, but it is surely expensive to meet the needs of intermodal customers which is what concerns me the most. Even if you maximize the number of intermodal trains a railroad can offer will they generate enough to even keep investors interested? I mean the current intermodal system is unattractive to many shippers that it is supposed to be marketed to and unless there is a stronger foundation for confidence that rail will be more flexible when it comes to the service it offers than I can not see pouring money into rail as a confident investment on either for private investors or taxpayer investment in infrastructure. So what is a sure investment, highway or rail? At least you know once the lanes are added they will in fact be used. When it comes to rail, you have to be confident that the intermodal schedule the railroad chooses is going to be attractive to shippers.
I mean I understand what murphy is saying is true “coal will not end tomorrow” but it is cause for concern 50 years down the road. For which we have no idea where regulations or any other kind of intervention will go.