Central Planning for Freight
26th October 2013
The Antiplanner gives us some inconvenient truth.
Rail is less expensive than trucks–if you have high volumes moving from point A to point B. But rail simply cannot compete with trucks for low volumes moving from many origins to many destinations. That’s why most rail shipping today is coal, grain, or containers–all things that can go from one of a few origins to one of a few destinations.
This goes double for cars. The reason why urban light-rail systems (except where they made sense Back In The Day, as in New York and Boston) lose money hand-over-fist even when heavily subsidized by The Taxpayer is that most work environments in the modern world aren’t organized around the model people-live-in-bedroom-communities-but-all-gather-together-in-the-city-core-for-the-workday any more. In days when both transportation and communication were primitive and expensive, that model made a great deal of sense. Nowadays, when transportation is (relatively) cheap and communication damned near free, that model is about as useful as a buggy whip.