Driving on I5 from Seattle to Portland is now a long line of semis, one after the other. Trucks, even loaded to the legal limit, cause 9,000 times as much fatigue damage to the road as a car (fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight).
It's inefficient and environmentally absurd to use trucks that way. Railroad tracks parallel I5. The solution is to pick the container off the semi, put it on a railcar, do the intercity haul on the rails (which are made for heavy loads) with minimal fuel and manpower costs, pick it up and put it on a truck to do the last mile in the destination city.
So why isn't this done now? Highways are subsidized by cars (fuel taxes), and railroads are taxed. The incentives are backwards.
What I'd do is significantly raise the weight taxes on trucks on the interstates, and use that money to subsidize the rail right-of-way.
Tiny nit, but from Wikipedia and [0], road damage goes up closer to the fourth power of axle weight. Just further support of your point: rail is absolutely the way to go, especially as it's all in place already.
I agree that rail seems ideal and much more economical and environmentally friendly, but is the system designed to handle consumer shipping with its demands for quick delivery with tight deadlines? (Which I'd argue constitutes a large portion of truck-based freight)
How much longer does it take to load/unload a freight train versus a truck? How much slower is the train and how longer does it take to ship? (and how does that affect cost or product quality when shipping items that must be refrigerated in transit?) Is it a realistic option for same-day or overnight shipping required for services like Amazon Prime in the volume that is currently being carried by trucks?
For items where delivery is not urgent, I'm all for using rail, but with expectations from consumers for quick delivery, its hard to see how they will be able to compete on the current system for rail-based freight.
An alternative (at least in the short-term), might be to create truck-only traffic lanes or highways with tolls and fewer exits. (and other lanes or highways just for cars) The lanes could be built to withstand the additional weight from the trucks, and non-truck traffic would run more efficiently and safely.
If people are willing to pay weight fees that reflect the true cost of fixing the road damage, they can continue to use the trucks. But why should taxpayers pay for 2 day delivery instead of 3 day by rail?
I'm not suggesting they should. My alternate solution was a toll based system where the trucks would pay extra for roads that can withstand the extra weight.
You could just increase the weigh station fees, but then you'd have to make all the lanes be able to withstand the extra weight, and you wouldn't have the extra benefits of safety (a car doesn't stand a chance against a truck in an accident) and efficiency (trucks can't accelerate/decelerate as fast as cars, so they contribute more to traffic congestion).
Figuring 44 hours to drive across the country (NYC to SF), and a maximum of 11 hours long-haul driving per day, gives 4 days. That's for a single driver; a team with a sleeper can go further. Call it 2x faster with a truck.
Certainly, but that's different topic than the same-day or overnight shipping that you were asking about, no?
Currently those fulfillment centers only use trucks. (I spot checked a few Amazon fulfillment areal photographs on Google Maps.) They would have to be relocated on rail lines, or lines moved to them. There would need to be about 4x more centers, since trucks are about 2x faster. Probably more like 6x more, since trucks and roads go places that trains can't get to because of grade limitations.
Only you know what 'realistic' means to you. We know it's possible to have a rail system that reaches most towns in the US - that's what we had until the automobile. Many of the right-of-ways still exist, but they were also designed for slower, lighter trains than we have now. And for days with more canned and pickled goods that weren't so time sensitive.
Trains don't scale down. Consider a small town grocery store. Currently it will get several different trucks making deliveries - soda, beer, fruit and veg, etc. These make deliveries to many different stores in the area. How does it work if we switch to delivery by rail? Does the train drop off a trailer bundled with all of the daily deliveries? If so, how are thing kept cool that need to be cool? Or are multiple trailers dropped off, and if so, where are they stored and how much room is needed? Does the store need to be next to the tracks?
Not true, unless the train is only hauling a single container (highly inefficient and impractical). Once a truck is loaded, it can leave. A train may have thousands of containers to load before departing, and may have to wait for other rail traffic before leaving. A truck could be probably be loaded in under an hour. A train would probably still require that the items be loaded on a truck first (unless you have a warehouse on the rail line) and then transferred to a train. That's got to be multi-hour process for both loading and unloading.
You could also build the roads properly to withstand truck traffic. The Canadians do a much better job at this than the U.S. does, from what I have seen. In Quebec, they've been rebuilding sections of the road north-east along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and extending down towards the Maine border from Quebec City. They go in and build the road bed up from ledge, blasting out sections to create more gentle grades. When they fix a section of road, it stays fixed, whereas all too often, we just go in and resurface the top layer every four or five years.
A toll for semis on the highway could be a good start. It would at least let them pay for the damage they cause. Weigh stations are already in place which should make tolling pretty simple to enact and it could even be variable based on the size of the truck / weight of the load.
The motor-fuels tax is proportional to the usage (until we have electric trucks, anyway) The problem is 20-25% of it is being redirected into the general fund. That's money that could be used to repair crumbling roads and decaying bridges but is going to pork-barrel projects.
In my region , I have been told the top drivers pulling Heavy loads . . steel coils 28,000 lbs, if overloaded are capable of using a maneuver . . when entering the scales of perching a back wheel on the curb . . reducing weigh in's . I was told these drivers are recruited , for these tax cheating skills , and highly paid.
Enforcement of rules, inspections, paperwork, etc. Fuel is taxed, not a toll for the road usage. In the OPs example where there is a rail line literally next to the interstate it would make sense to charge a large toll. For other highways that don't have parallel railways it would not make sense to charge a hefty freight toll.
For trips over 150-600 miles (depending on the region), Rail is absolutely the way to go - the issue with rail in say a SEA to PDX (or for that matter a YVR to PDX) trip is the load/unload times at each end, which can add up to more than the total transit time for the freight movement.
I believe that they use this, but that only accounts for the movement, not, switching the traincars onto the correct siding, locating a chassis, staging it, moving the chassis/container to a parking area, and the coordinating it to be picked up by a tractor. It's more than just the load/unload.
That's because they closed the shipping terminal down in Portland so they have to ship it all via semi. From what I understand train has much higher latency(and its being taken up by coal/oil cars).
Over the last 6 months its really driven ip traffic on I-5.
I would assume that shifting the truck traffic to the rails would entail improving the rail infrastructure, such as increasing capacity and adding convenient stations optimized for transferring loads between semis and flatcars.
But that's still got to be an order of magnitude cheaper than increasing freeway capacity, and of course all the money spent on constantly rebuilding them.
It's inefficient and environmentally absurd to use trucks that way. Railroad tracks parallel I5. The solution is to pick the container off the semi, put it on a railcar, do the intercity haul on the rails (which are made for heavy loads) with minimal fuel and manpower costs, pick it up and put it on a truck to do the last mile in the destination city.
So why isn't this done now? Highways are subsidized by cars (fuel taxes), and railroads are taxed. The incentives are backwards.
What I'd do is significantly raise the weight taxes on trucks on the interstates, and use that money to subsidize the rail right-of-way.