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Mismanaged West Coast Ports

By | | Transportation
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Empty shelves in supermarkets and other stores are due in part to hundreds of thousands of shipping containers waiting to be unloaded at ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and other cities. According to market urbanist Scott Beyer, this backlog is due to a combination of labor unrest and NIMBYism.

More than 60 container ships are waiting outside the Port of Los Angeles for space to unload their cargo.

That’s certainly true in Portland, whose container port was completely shut down by labor disputes four years ago, and now is just beginning to function again. Moreover, trucks carrying containers out of Portland face some of the worst congestion in the country, partly due to anti-highway groups that oppose congestion relief on the grounds that it might lead people to drive more. Continue reading →

A Questionable Change in Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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According to page 57 the European Union publication, Panorama of Transport, 43 percent of American freight is shipped by rail and 30 percent goes by truck. This makes the American rail freight system the envy of the world, as just 10 percent of European freight goes by rail, with 46 percent going by truck, and just 4 percent of Japanese freight goes by rail, with 60 percent going by truck.

The EU got its U.S. data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ annual National Transportation Statistics report. However, if you look at the most recent edition of table 1-50: U.S. ton-miles of freight in that report, you won’t find those numbers at all. Instead (using 2006 data), something like 42 percent of freight goes by truck while only 32 percent goes by rail. That’s still a greater share of freight going by rail than in Europe or Japan, but a reversal in dominance between rail and trucks.

Yet the Panorama of Transport didn’t get it wrong. I have the corresponding table from the 2008 edition of National Transportation Statistics, and the numbers for 2006 in that table agree with those used by the EU. So what happened to change the numbers?

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Central Planning for Freight

By | | Transportation
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It’s not enough that urban planners are messing up passenger travel in cities. Now they want to “reduce urban impacts” of freight transport. This report, with its discussion of “modal shifts” and “Freight villages,” reads like someone took a smart-growth plan for rail transit and transit-oriented developments and simply did a bunch of finds-and-replaced.

The report includes numerous comparisons of the costs of truck vs. rail freight. 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.

The fundamental problem with this report is the same as is found in most anti-auto reports: it treats trucks as the problem rather than treating the impacts of trucks. Are trucks noisy? Yes, but muffling the noise works better than trying to limit truck traffic. Do they pollute? Yes, but we know that pollution can be cleaned up at the exhaust pipe more effectively than by reducing miles of travel. Do trucks add to congestion? Sure, but treating congestion with variable-priced roads, signal coordination, and similar road improvements works better than trying to reduce driving.
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