I wonder if we'll even need trucks. Instead of large trucks carrying lots of goods, what about having more vehicles each carrying less stuff. Something like a cargo van.
I wonder if the reason we use large trucks is so that we can have only one driver and not pay for more. I wonder if having multiple vans instead of a single truck uses a similar amount of fuel (per pound of cargo).
1) The space needed to drive safely behind the car/truck in front of you would be wasted. Cargo, in a container (semi-van, etc.) does not need to travel a safe distance behind the cargo in-front of it; it is tightly packed, and there is a lot of 'cargo'. If all cargo was transported via. cargo vans, the wasted space in-between vehicles (distance for the same volume of cargo traveling with a semi-truck) traveling down the highway would add up to a HUGE distance. Btw. Lets see it in practice:
- The average distance a Truck Load semi-truck travels down the highway is ~856-miles
- DOT Guidelines suggest a three-second rule for driving behind a vehicle. So... at an average speed of 55 m.p.h. A car is traveling at 81ft/second. At three seconds this is 243 ft behind the car in front of you.
- A normal truck container is 48' (we'll go with 48' but there are 53'), and holds 24 pallets. 12 and 12 (side-by side), from front to back.
- I am not sure how many pallets a cargo van could take, but let's go with 2 (it is probably less than this).
At 2 pallets for each cargo van, we would need 12 cargo vans for the equivalent of shipping 1 semi-truck.
At an average of 55 m.p.h. on the highway, 12 cargo vans would total 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between. That's more than a 1/2 mile
* we, keychainlogistics.com have over 40,000 shipments on our system, right now, that would go on a single semi-truck. Most for today. In calculating needing cargo vans for these loads (sure they very in size, but lets go with a total size of 24 pallets per shipment) it would equal 12 * 40,000 = 480,000 vehicles.
With an average of 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between each truckload worth of shipment (calculation referenced above), we are talking a total of 40,000 (combined 12 cargo vans here) * 2,916 ft = 116,640,000 ft of wasted space which = 22,090.91 miles wasted
1.b) Think about the congestion on highways!
2) Large items needing to be shipped: Equipment, Logs, containers, etc.
3) Freight containers from ports. They are a standard size, and the maritime shipping industry, until 1950's or so did not use containers. The book - The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - gives an amazing/detailed understanding to the efficiency of containers. Which ultimately you need a semi-truck to transport a container.
4) The time to load palletized goods (something that would likely not fit in a cargo van) is much shorter than loading individual boxes
I wonder if the reason we use large trucks is so that we can have only one driver and not pay for more. I wonder if having multiple vans instead of a single truck uses a similar amount of fuel (per pound of cargo).