There's some good stuff in here, but also some bad ideas. The bad ones:
- Bring the military and National Guard container chassis to relieve the ports. That works, unless there's a situation where the military or National Guard need them, in which case it could be catastrophic.
- Force railroads to haul to this one particular new site. First, I kind of bristle at the word "force". That's not how it works in a free country. Second, there is no unused facility available that has the rail bandwidth to handle the traffic level that he's talking about. Third, the containers were intended to go to Dallas (the example he used), not to this new site 100 miles from LA. How and when do they get from there to Dallas?
Theres an AFB outside of LA with proper rail siding. He identified it & facilities in thread.
Railroad are a regulated monopoly. DOT/FRA can mandate service & regulate rates (either for freight or using their track) to prevent one carrier from making movement impossible. If DOT/FRA do it right they'd economically incentivise the short haul.
Another example is railroads. Since deregulation in 1980, Wall Street consolidated 33 firms into just seven. And because the Surface Transportation Board lacks authority, Wall Street-owned railroads cut their workforce by 33% over the last six years, degrading our public shipping capacity. The Union Pacific closed a giant Chicago sorting facility in 2019; it now has so much backed up traffic that it suspended traffic from west coast ports.
Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.
Then there’s trucking. Talk to most businesspeople who make or move things and they will complain about the driver shortage. This too is a story of deregulation. In the 1970s, the end of public rate-setting forced trucking firms to compete against each other to offer lower shipping prices. The way they did this was by lowering pay to their drivers. Trucking on a firm-level became unpredictable and financially fragile, so for drivers schedules became unsustainable, even if the pay during boom times could be high. Today, even though pay is going up, the scheduling is crushing drivers. The result is a shortage of truckers.
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These problems have been building for some time. There was no spare capacity left and the sudden rise in demand overwhelmed the system, and it takes years to increase capacity. After deregulation hedge funds bought up railroads, gutted common carrier regulations, and forced railroads to only carry the most profitable cargo, while _closing_ rail terminals! This also forced more cargo onto trucks.
> Theres an AFB outside of LA with proper rail siding. He identified it & facilities in thread.
It exists. It has a rail siding. Can it handle the throughput that we're talking about? Air force bases have rail service, but they don't have the infrastructure for high-volume rail traffic.
> Railroad are a regulated monopoly.
Railroads are regulated, but are not a monopoly. (Though a railroad may have a monopoly on rail service to a particular customer, that's not the usual definition of a monopoly.)
> DOT/FRA can mandate service & regulate rates (either for freight or using their track) to prevent one carrier from making movement impossible. If DOT/FRA do it right they'd economically incentivise the short haul.
I believe that the STB is the one that regulates rates and service (and much less stringently than the old Interstate Commerce Commission did pre-Staggers Act deregulation). DOT is more about regulating safety.
Anyway: Could it be done? Yes, maybe, to some degree. Could they move enough containers to unblock the ports in a finite amount of time? I'm much more skeptical. It's not a matter of the rates and regulation, either - it's a matter of building track and other infrastructure at the AFB.
For any particular industrial customer? OK. For a medium-sized town? Maybe. For hauling containers from LA to Dallas, or even from LA to an air force base 100 miles away. in a world where interstate highways exist? No.
> For hauling containers from LA to Dallas, or even from LA to an air force base 100 miles away. in a world where interstate highways exist? No.
Moving the same amount of containers that a train can carry from LA to Dallas with trucks will require you to pay for than more 200 truck drivers/trucks for a 2 day journey. The cost compared to using a train will be ridiculous. And that's only if you're lucky. Due to trucks being able to carry much less weight, you may need to up that number (and split the contents of containers) or switch to heavy transport vehicles.
In fact you've got that reversed. The costs for moving that stuff to an air force base 100 miles away will be much closer. You usually need some trucks to go the last miles anyways, and the logistics involved in loading/unloading a train is going to make it less efficient compared to the longer journey.
In this example, the containers weren't bound for Dallas, the trains were. They're being commandeered from their normal route to move the containers to a new pickup point where the trucks will get them.
That's backwards. The issue is the chassis/trailer, right? Use the trucks to take the containers to the AFB, and use the trains to take them from there to Dallas. A truck (and chassis/trailer) can make two or three trips a day from LA/LB to the AFB. Or, it can take two or three days to take one container to Dallas.
Yes, the issue is the chasses. Removing the containers from the port frees up the chasses that are currently holding them.
And why are you taking all the containers to Dallas? They aren't bound for Dallas, they're all going to different places, which is why you need a fleet of trucks to get them to their various destinations. The trains are just to get them to the new pickup point. It's a temporary measure to free up chasses until the logjam at the port works its way free.
He only mentioned Dallas as a way to say "The trains aren't running their full usual cross-country route [i.e., all the way to Dallas]. They're just running the 1st leg back and forth over and over again so that the containers can be moved as quickly as possible." The goal was never to get the containers to Dallas.
- Bring the military and National Guard container chassis to relieve the ports. That works, unless there's a situation where the military or National Guard need them, in which case it could be catastrophic.
- Force railroads to haul to this one particular new site. First, I kind of bristle at the word "force". That's not how it works in a free country. Second, there is no unused facility available that has the rail bandwidth to handle the traffic level that he's talking about. Third, the containers were intended to go to Dallas (the example he used), not to this new site 100 miles from LA. How and when do they get from there to Dallas?