One of the best things we could do for our highways in this country is to improve our freight rail network. There would be many benefits of doing this, most of which involve having fewer trucks on the road. It would reduce congestion, of course — but also lessen the need for costly maintenance and repair. A commonly cited statistic is that a 70 ton tractor trailer does as much damage to a roadway as 10,000 passenger cars.
Unfortunately, our freight rail system is a mess right now. The bottlenecks in the system are so bad that many companies choose to haul freight by road anyway — it costs more, but there’s no chance that a shipment will get stuck in some congested rail yard for a few days and throw off a just-in-time delivery schedule.
The bottlenecks are bad around major ports like Long Beach, Miami, and NY/NJ–but the epicenter of the problem is in Chicago, the largest rail hub in the national network. The backups there are often so acute that freight has to be unloaded and trucked a short distance to another local yard before resuming its journey.
To deal with the problem in Chicago alone would cost about $2.5 billion, according to a report that will air on PBS’s Newshour this evening (part of the excellent Blueprint America Series). But an unusually broad coalition of forces–environmental groups and business groups are on the same page, for once–are stepping up and saying that the government should make an investment to improve the freight network. The environmental benefits include less air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from trucks. The economic benefits of more efficient and predictable movement of goods would be widely shared.
One sticky wicket in all this is the freight companies, who worry about letting the government get involved in their private enterprise. But the national advantages of improving and expanding our freight rail system are so great and so obvious, that the government will probably find a way to throw some money at the problem.
April 21st, 2009 at 12:58 am
I certainly don’t deny that freight rail needs investment, but there may additional solutions:
A supply chain expert told me a few years ago that, in times of high warehousing costs, a business with a master agreement with a rail company will simply ship freight around the country (as opposed to warehousing it) until the goods are actually needed.
I don’t know to what extent that contributes to the problem, but this statement was from one of the top experts in the country.