Dear Tim:
If your looking at the whole US population 1.4 million is only a few. You seem to be implying that its 1.4 million just for the Chicago area. That doesn't exactly square with the average commute time for Chicago being 32.7 minutes and for all of Illinois being 26.7 minutes. (Seems that was 2002 data, for 2003 its 33.2, and 27, no data is available for 2004 or later.
Yet if you look at McHenry County and not just City of Chicago which ignores all their suburbs (which covers many NW Illinois counties, not just Cook County). It also includes kids going to work after school, wives going to their local businesses like a resturant waitress or clerk. Those are not considered commuters although they are added into your survey. Besides many people under estimate how long it takes really when answering that survey.
Take the questionaire and answer the 110 or so questions. Its on your honor to do it like you do every 10 years when the census people show up. Look at what you wrote for the commute time. Then take a stopwatch or something similar and time the amount it takes between exitting your door and going through the employee entrance at work. Do the same for going home. Do that for every day for a week. Now average those out (Hint divide by ten). Now compare that to what you answered on the questionaire. If you are like most, the questionaire is between 20 and 40% lower than the real times. Now look at what your children answered and your wife. They get added in and averaged. Brings down your commute time quite a bit, doesn't it. Now take the average time for your family and compare it to what the standard number is for the city you are in. Then take the ratio of your time divided by your family time and multiply that by the 30+ minutes for Chicago. That's the real time for the long distance commuter. Quite a bit above the average in the survey you quote.
The survey for Chicago by their planning board has better numbers more akin to what the primary bread winner faces. 14% of them in Chicago face over an hour. Thats from about 4 million of those (remove wives and children). That is still 560K which would fill most stadiums 7 times over.
Point me to where I said you stated that. I merely point out that you can't reduce road miles (including reduction in miles not yet built) and simply make up for it with more rail track. Apparently however you are just arguing for less truck traffic and saving maintenance costs from the reduced truck traffic. However I don't think such large reductions are possible. Maybe you can get less growth going forward, or even modest cuts, but I don't think big cuts are going to happen any time soon.
I am not reducing road miles. I specifically stated that not one mile of road would be eliminated. What I said was that Vehicle Miles Traveled would be cut. And you fail to take into account that by having the government pay for trackage and terminals like they do for highways and ports, the costs would be cut by one half to one third. The CBO determined that trucking does not pay the full cost for the highways and terminals through taxes, licenses, tolls and user fees. So trucking is subsidized while railroads are not. Furthermore adding infrastructure costs more for railroads because they must more than cover the risks while government doesn't have to. They also must insure the trackage and infrastructure while government doesn't. A CBO study states that the subsidy is about 25% of trucking revenue.
Cutting 25% from train shipping costs and the 8% annual growth rate in intermodal shipping would double easy. 42% of the nations freight (ton miles) is shipped by train now. To get that 90% of long distance trucking reduction, rail would need to get to 67% which is about 20 years at current rates or 10 years by the quicker rate.
That was one of your points. One that I disagreed with pretty simply and directly. I don't think that its realistic. Now a cut of much less than 80 to 90% would still have an effect, and such a cut might be possible, but it won't be easy, and simply building more track won't be enough to get a massive reduction in long distance semi traffic.
But I included more terminals and with them being government owned, there would not be the jockeying to move them on a given track so that both time is reduced (the 40 hours to go the last 40 miles would likely be cut to a couple of hours or less) and efficiency is increased (four or five companies share ten intermodal terminals in a place like Chicago so the location and not who owns it becomes the determining factor as to which to use). The same would be for interchanges (sorting, yards and main line connections).
If its 1% of Chicago commuters. Well 140,000 people isn't an insignificant total, but you don't base major changes in policy off of 1%.
BS! Terrorists are far less than 1% of all travelers, yet how many major policy changes were made to combat them? Less than 1% of companies are monopolies which had major policies enacted regulating them. Less than 1% of the population is a serial killer, a child molester or a murderer yet, there are many laws passed because of them. About 1% of the major power plants are nuclear, yet how many major policies were changed or created to handle them? Some fixed percentage is not a threshold for major policy changes. Many policies reduce the scope until the target becomes a significant percentage of cases.
"The most common commuting pattern today is suburb to suburb."
Which isn't even covered at all in your statistics you cited (above). That statistic is only for citizens of the City of Chicago which leaves out any citizen in a suburb of Chicago. Your source doesn't cover the entire metropolitan area of Chicago. The typical person thinks Milwaukee Metropolitan includes the counties of Racine, Waukesha, Washington, Ozaukee, Kenosha and of course, Milwaukee. Yet the Census figures Milwaukee Metro is Milwaukee County only.
If your going to add "subsidized" to trucks, you should also add it to rail. Or it might be simpler to leave it off everything, or everything but that doesn't have an unusual level of subsidies.
Freight railroads have no subsidies and even the CBO puts the truck freight subsidy at 25% of trucking revenue. That is a lot of subsidy. Would you switch cell phone companies to save 25%? Change shipping companies to save 25% on a package? Would you switch to an alternative, if an additional $0.13 a mile tax was placed on a midsize car (none for a subcompact car or motorcycle), $0.26 on a full size car, minivan or wagon, $0.40 on a pickup or SUV?
What if they got rid of gas taxes and charged you a road damage fee based on the size (GVWR) of the vehicle and how far and fast you drove? That would be quite a bit more fair than the current gas tax system. A one ton subcompact car driven 60MPH does 3.2 times the damage as a two ton full size car at 75MPH and that would be reflected in the rate. A 0.3 ton Harley at 80MPH gets charged 0.7 times as much per mile. And those 4 ton huge SUVs racing at 80MPH get charged 9 times as much per mile. And that 36 ton (80K lbs) semi at 70MPH gets charged 57 times the subcompact car per mile. Now they only get charged 4-6 times that of the subcompact car. A bicycle is about 0.1 tons and travels at 20MPH which damages the road only 0.004 times as much.
2 - More freight cars will likely lead to longer delays. It shouldn't make the train move slower (at least not to a significant extent, esp. if your building more line), but loading and unloaded the containers from the train and getting them sent to the right destination will take longer.
Longer trains means more cranes and forklifts can be used at the same time. In ports, a ship twice as long gets twice as many cranes working on it yielding about the same load and unload times. Trains are fixed in width and height. Ships however are not, except if they go through canals and locks. And a longer train can be broken into two or more pieces as well. This is how car trains would likely work so that the drive on or off doesn't get past a certain distance.
Intermodal over rail might be growing faster than trucks, but truck use is still growing. So "intermodal climbing even against subsidized trucks" isn't really relevant. It hardly indicates that slashing of truck traffic is at all likely.
Once you get to the tipping point, then increases in intermodal traffic will indeed lower truck VMTs. We aren't there yet. But with a 25% subsidy that trucks enjoy removed by some means (increasing truck use taxes or subsidizing freight trains), that tipping point may be quickly exceeded.
Pete |
