May 10 2009
Bigger trucks? How about fewer?
Vice President Joe Biden is on record as being an aficionado of passenger rail transit, as evidenced by his longtime tradition of taking the train from Wilmington to Washington rather than living inside the Beltway. Hopefully he’s just as much in favor of freight rail, because the trucking industry is at it again.
The current limit of 80,000 pounds for an individual truck has somehow become a chokepoint on commerce, and now trucking interests want that limit raised to 97,000 pounds. Yeah, with U.S. infrastructure being at a low point, what we want to do is authorize even heavier trucks, if only to see which interstate highway bridges can’t bear up under the punishment. Of course, this survival-of-the-fittest mentality has a few flaws in it.
Typically, what people hear is how much in highway use taxes truckers pay and how nothing gets to your home or community except aboard a truck. It’s nice spin, but most highway departments will tell you that even the heavy-duty tolls and taxes truckers pay falls way short of paying the freight, so to speak. Those fees don’t completely offset the damage from the continued punishment of thousands of 40-ton monstrosities a day, and they drive up the design and construction costs of all new highways and bridges as well.
As for all your stuff coming via truck, that’s so stupid it bears mockery. Of course everything gets to your house or local store via truck. But a UPS van is hardly comparable to one of those 22-wheel, twin-trailer monstrosities that blot out the sun as they pass you on the interstate. The fact that this country essentially has no transportation policy is why so much freight has transitioned from declining railroads to interstate highways. Those railways shouldn’t have been allowed to decline in the first place, and anybody who can’t see the essential wastefulness of giant trailer trucks running freight from Portland, Maine to San Diego or Seattle to Miami needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
You occasionally hear civil engineers and planning authorities talking up things like intermodal transfer points, where railways meet highways and loads are transfered from trucks to trains and vice versa, but nobody can make these proposals stick because setting up one of these things in one place is no guarantee that there will be another one at the other end of a proposed trip. This is the shortcoming of localized planning compared to nationwide, statewide or even county-wide. As a result, transportation experts note that there are so many trucks in transit at any one time that the interestate highway system itself functions as a giant warehouse.
Big trucks in the large numbers we have are safety hazards and we need to be decreasing their number on the highways via the revitalization of the railroads for freight and for passenger transit. (This is not to impugn truck drivers in general, who are better trained than us car drivers and are far less likely to be at fault in truck-car collisions.)
A transition back to freight rail would be more energy-efficient, though how much so is a matter of debate. But it’s a far more defensible theory than those of the trucking lobbyists who claim raising maximum truck weights would do the same thing. In reality, every increase in maximum truck size has also increased the number of trucks on our highways. Starting to turn those trends around would be a boon to highway safety, cleaner air and energy efficiency.
