"price gouging"

[tofu]

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[Rick Denney]

I heard once with Fed Ex all packages are shipped to memphis or a central location and from there distributed

That's only true for Fedex Express (i.e., when it absolutely, positively has to be there by 10:30 tomorrow morning). And trains are far too slow for that service. Those packages are flown to Memphis, sorted, and then flown to their destination delivery points. The central sorting location is what makes it work for them (and they were the first to succeed in providing that service).

Fedex Ground is just like UPS--point-to-point by truck.

Trucks have flexibility that trains do not have, and trucking companies have control over their fleets that they do not have over trains. Trains are very good for bulk materials, but they are not so good for package delivery. It is true that trucks use a subsidized infrastructure and trains have to own and maintain theirs, and it is true that trucks owners and operators do not pay their fair share of what the highways cost to build and maintain. But it is also true that the railroads tied their own hands and feet by treating their employees so badly that those employees were able to gain political support for draconian labor rules, many of which persist to this day. In many ways, they did it to themselves.

There is a balance point between distance and number of destinations served where it is no longer economical to operate train passenger service. The reason is that it takes too long compared to flying. Very few people would consider driving the alternative to a train when going from Memphis to Grand Rapids. The vast majority of people who might make trips that length will fly. Thus, train passenger service is left with those who are afraid/unwilling to fly, those who have tubas and don't want to fly, or those who prefer to take a long slow trip.

I once took a train trip from Houston to Tucson. It took 25 hours--even though the train went faster than a car, it stopped for longer and ended up taking about the same time. Flying would have taken three hours. I took the train because I absolutely, positively had to be in Bisbee on a Sunday (to officiate at the bicycle racing national championships in 1980), and on Friday night I learned that my Saturday flight had been canceled because of a threatening hurricane. The AC on the train didn't work and it was an arduous journey.

I now live near DC and when I have to go to New York, I happily take the train. In that case, however, the train makes perfect sense.

In Europe, the distance/destination ratio is much smaller--more like the northeastern U.S. where passenger service makes sense (and where it is well-supported by customers).

I would like to see the truck industry pay its fair share of highway construction and maintenance costs. But I cannot argue against their point that the subsidy they receive returns to us many-fold in terms of improved productivity for the industries they support.

Rick "noting that every 'simple' solution has a raft of unintended consequences being towed along behind it" Denney

[tofu]

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[Todd S. Malicoate]

The "Tubashaman Graduate Audition Tour"...get your tickets now while they last!!!

[SplatterTone]

I am now too old to do that much stuff and that much driving in a single day.

It just takes the right approach. I am over 50, and I spent 25 hours driving 750 miles one-way from Tulsa to Middleton, WI (suburb of Madison) and back again to get the 191 with the last 200 miles in one of the biggest winter storm of the season.
What to do:
1. Have a good sound system in your vehicle.
2. Have a minimum 20 GB MP3 player (in my case, an Archos gmini XS200 (no longer made)).
3. Listen to the music and RELAX. Always relax. Meditate even. Don't waste energy.
4. Bring along some freeze dried instant coffee. I use Kava.
5. When the music and relaxing are no longer working, EAT the coffee. Yeah boy. That will give you a few more hours of life.

[eupher61]

Railroads are at or nearly at capacity any more.

Amtrak is a joke in many areas, which is extremely unfortunate. F'rinstance, between St Louis and KC, the schedule says about 5 hours. In the last 15 years I've not heard of it taking less than 6. The rails are owned by freight haulers, so they have priority, and sometimes the Amtrak will have to sit on a siding for a couple of hours. Plus, if the tracks are under water or under construction or almost any other excuse, they use a bus anyway. I'd love to take Amtrak to St Louis more often, but I don't want the risk of running so late.

Now, KC to Chicago, not via St Louis...that sounds like a cool trip!

[tofu]

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[Rick Denney]

If I could pay $200 for a r/t ticket to Grand Rapids with that sort of service (yes, requiring vast new rail construction/*nuclear-coal-gas plants for the electricity) ...duh! I'd be there. Driving sucks, and (assuming "booked well in advance") a $400 r/t plane ticket (with all of its luggage restrictions) sucks.

My suspicion is that costs exceed the price you would be willing to pay. If it were not so, somebody would be offering the service, or talking about offering the service.

Empty trains are not more efficient consumers of resources than full cars. Emptiness is the main reason we have fewer passenger trains. And prices that exceed service expectations are the main reason we have emptiness.

People do not use Fedex Express if they don't mind the extra day, by the way. They pay the high Fedex price specifically because it gets there the next day with high reliability. Fedex Ground, UPS, and USPS are cheaper and they generally use trucks (and trains, when reasonable). The problem with trains is that moving big piles of multi-destination packages on and off rail cars is extremely difficult and expensive. Moving grain, liquid, aggregate, coal, and other bulk materials, however, is easier with a train car than with a truck. Airplanes are hard, too, but they are mostly reserved for the high-priced (read: so that price exceeds costs) next-day service. It still takes a train some days to cross the country, and if I'm prepared to wait some days, I don't want to pay next-day prices.

Also, many companies who have brought their distribution in-house own or lease their own trailers (and often their own trucks), and that allows them to keep their loads together and under their control during the transportation process. Train cars often just carry too much, and the loads have to be mixed and matched. The solution to that issue has been to put truck trailers on rail cars, but you still have a service expectation that has to be met. International freight has already gone down that road with loads now fully containerized.

Freight also has a different set of expectations now than in the past. In the past, manufacturers and distributors expected to warehouse a lot of their goods or raw materials. Now, to reduce costs, they have gone to computerized inventory controls and "just in time" shipping that minimizes their need to warehouse their raw materials. But it puts more demand on the flexibility and responsiveness of the shipping medium. And trains have never been particularly flexible or responsive.

Rick "thinking we need more interstates" Denney

[SplatterTone]

"One of these days" it will be computerized. Whether it is pneumatic pipelines, overhead rails, mini overland rails. The box has a chip in it with the destination encoded. The shipper puts the box on "the sytem", and the computers take it from there.

In the meantime, your life crystal is working its way to red, and Carousel for you!

[Rick Denney]

When I was a kid, trains were PACKED.

Well, Joe, you're wrong on this one. Some trains, here and there, may have been full when you were a kid. But they surely were not packed, except in those few spots. You aren't that old. They certainly were not packed when I was a kid, and I was a kid at the same time you were. We are about 20 years too young to be able to make that claim, and those two decades older were kids during the tail end of the Depression and during WWII and its aftermath.

In every city in the world, people chose to change their mode of travel to private cars the very moment they could afford to. This is well-documented in the professional literature, which you will be entirely excused for not having been forced to read, as I have. In the U.S., this occurred starting in the late 40's, and really gathered steam in the early 50's.

The bloom may be off the automotive rose for some folks now, but it's way too late for the formerly profitable train services that went long out of business because of those choices made by their departing customers.

In cities where transit worked, street cars could not support suburban development with single-family homes. And in every city where people have been allowed to choose, they have chosen to live in suburbs where they have a yard, air around their house, and a driveway for their car. Fixed-route transit does not serve these residential development patterns very well, but buses, which can be easily reconfigured, do.

It was not a grand conspiracy. You are assuming entirely too much intelligence on the part of the government officials you accuse. Yes, there was a lot of paying off and corruption as there has always been and always will be, and, yes, that corruption is anti-market (though it's as American as apple pie) and immoral, but it's not the reason people choose to own and drive cars and it's not the reason they choose to own houses in the suburbs.

What sort of government fiat would it take to prevent people from making these choices? Ask Europeans; they can tell you. Ask the Japanese, where people are not allowed to even purchase a car unless privileged to have a parking place.

And cities have grown to the point where single, central business districts can no longer support the population. Cities that were developed before cars and before people could afford those choices now attract those who can tolerate such living conditions. Those places are well supported by fixed-route transit already, and that includes most European and Japanese cities. It does not include most U.S. cities outside of New York and the cores of a few other old cities like Philadelphia and Chicago.

Intercity transit was popular only because it was the only option. Air travel was for rich people, and highway buses for poor people. So, the middle class took trains, if trains went where they were going. After WWII, they could afford to buy cars and when that happened, trains as a mode of travel for the middle class were history, except in a few places where it made sense.

I've heard many urban planners decry "sprawl" and the car culture, but the fact is that people chose, and continue to choose, that mode of living and travel. Again, do you want a government that would prevent people from making those choices? If so, there are many would-be rulers who would accommodate that desire if given the chance. But I don't think you would like the result.

People are not always rational, but they are always We The People.

Rick "who lives on the front lines of this debate" Denney

[tofu]

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[Ricko]

An update on Nashville's gas woes = > http://tinyurl.com/3nwbcx" target="_blank

It'll be interesting to see if we have another run on gas this Friday

Interesting discussion on the train/freight side of things... working for a company that moves a good bit of freight - we stay far away from using trains with the exception of commodity type materials. Until recently the railroads couldn't provide any sort of reliable time frames for delivery (within 2 weeks), wouldn't provide any type of time frame for pickup (within 2 weeks) and never took any responsibility for the condition of the load once it (finally) arrived. Contrast that with trucking (both truckload and LTL) where they can schedule a pickup or delivery to the hour and (at least the quality ones) provide some level of reassurance or responsibility the load will arrive in reasonably good condition.

A couple of the national level trucking companies have partnered with rail lines to move quantities of their trailers about halfway across the country (i.e. SAIA and BNSF) where they're off-loaded and trucked to the final destination.

[Rick Denney]

There are a whole bunch of reasons for the emptiness of passenger trains in years gone by. With the advent of cheap cars folks moved out from the large cities to the suburbs. Most then commuted back to the city by train but used the car to do their shopping etc out in the burbs. The advent of the subsidized Interstates in the '50's meant you could drive in the comfort of your own car directly from your house to say Aunt Sally two states over....

More interstates - wow - they already have shown that the more you build the worse the problem becomes. We need more interstates like a hole in the head. What we need to do is change behavior. BTW, try finding a seat on Amtrak these days - even with bad schedules, bad equipment and the gov't trying to kill them - the trains ARE PACKED - RIGHT NOW!

Several points:

1. You cannot say that more interstates have made the problem worse. Expanding population, disproportionately relocating to cities, has made the problem worse. It is entirely likely that the interstates have slowed the growth of the problem. People don't say, "Hey, there's a nice new road. I think I'll buy a car and move to the suburbs!" No, they buy a car and move to the suburbs, and then apply pressure on the politicians to build new roads.

2. It wasn't cheap cars that moved people to the suburbs--in real dollars, cars were no cheaper in the 50's than they had been in the 20's. It was the desire to live in open air. Cars just helped make it easy.

3. Do not judge most U.S. cities by the few large eastern cities that were built up before the car became the dominant mode of personal transportation. I doubt you could show any evidence that people who moved to the suburbs in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Nashville, or Atlanta, to name some examples, ever rode a train, or that a train was even available for them to ride until more recent years. Maybe in New York, Boston, and Chicago. Not in DC (or Charlotte, or Orlando, or Miami, or Dallas, or San Antonio).

4. People live where they want to live, if they can afford to. Then, they try to change the situation around them to make it convenient. They clamor for more and better roads, more and better transit options, and then more convenient commutes. What happens is that the central cities are abandoned to those who cannot afford those options, and then employers start to chase their workers to the suburbs. That's why Houston, for example, has half a dozen major business districts in some cases miles away from downtown. Most newer cities are building up that way if they are allowed to. You end up with a cellular. I live 50 miles from DC, and work 25 miles from DC, for example, and I'm not at all uncommon. The very few of my neighbors who work in DC often do take a transit mode to do it, but the reason they do is because they already lived out here and they ended up with a job that took them to DC. They complain about it all the time.

5. Your description of the things that happened to the railroads following WWII do not refute my statement that the business model for passenger trains no longer worked. The costs required a higher price than people would pay considering the reduced convenience of using a train--the price exceeded the service expectation.

6. I ride Amtrak frequently. Yes, the trains are more full, particularly in popular corridors. But that is not because trains are so good (I've been delayed, sometimes horribly, on Amtrak). It's because the airlines have gotten so bad, and flying is such an ugly experience now compared to even just ten years ago. But I have never had a problem finding a seat on the popular DC-to-New York route--the train is certainly less crowded than the New Jersey Turnpike.

7. "What is needed is changed behavior" has been the starting point of many totalitarian horrors (not all). Do we, as government, design a transportation system to our liking and then require people to use it? What if we change our minds (which we do every dozen years or so) about what's important? We've tried that with land-use planning, and have found that government is extremely weak when it comes to forcing behavior. Freedom from government exerting control on our lives has consequences not all of which are positive, but personally I'm willing to take the bad with the good.

8. Oh, I almost forgot. UPS uses a lot of rail. But do they use it for their next-day service? If they have time to containerize their packages into hub groupings, then they can use rail. But I daresay that it adds a half a day or a day on each end to make efficient use of freight rail.

Rick "for whom writing about this topic is too much like work" Denney

[Rick Denney]

More than most people, I understand the concept of freedom, but I also understand the concepts of waste and inefficiency.

Who said freedom was efficient?

Who's gonna build those railroads you way we must have? Who's gonna pay for it? Who's gonna decide where it goes? Who's gonna set the price? Who's gonna force people to use it?

Rick "who thinks the only exclusive qualification government has to do this is willingness, and it's easy for them to be willing--it's not their money" Denney

[Uncle Buck]

(btw: Sometimes, would you be willing to pay $30 - rather than $40 - to have a UPS Ground or FedExGround package left to be picked up by you at a location 4 miles from your home - rather than delivered to your door?...Most of the time, I would.)

For me, that would be almost every time. I get really tired of coming home to those sticky notes on my door. In fact, the most recent tuba I received through UPS got damaged when the driver unloaded it at my house, even though I had asked UPS to hold it at the depot for me to pick up.

[tbn.al]

Last week the Gov of GA took a rather strong stance on gougers, said he would prosecute under some 1974 law and lock them up if necessary. Now we don't have any gas. You can buy all you want at 4.20 a gallon, down from $5+ last week, if you can find any. I took a 6 mile trip today and the first 7 stations I passed were out of gas. When I finally saw one with a supply, the lines were blocking the right hand two lanes in two directions. I am not an economist, but I'll bet the free market system could find me some gas at a price I would be willing to pay. As it is, no matter how much money I have, I have to wait in a dangerous traffic jam for 2 hours to get it.

[tofu]

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[Rick Denney]

One of the things about most travelers of today is that the concept of a more than 75 mile train trip or what you might think of as long distance train travel is either nonexistent or colored by a trip on Amtrak which no one who rode in the Golden Age of Passenger service would call quality train service. They just don't know what a better than driving say 500 miles experience it can be. Folks also are colored by air travel. They don't understand that sometimes the journey is better than the end point....

We have gotten so caught up with zooming to everything that these days folks are always stressed out by the travel experience. Somehow we convinced ourselves that because travel by train took considerably longer (than air but faster than car), that it was all wasted time.

I attended a research committee meeting in Detroit in July. I drove from northern Virginia, and the drive took about 8 hours.

I told my boss I was driving, and he all but ordered me to fly. It was only when I pointed out that driving would not take more time out of my work schedule than flying did he relax about it. Even if there were train service, I doubt I would have been able to find trains going and coming at just the times I would have needed them in order not to eat up time in the way my boss objected to. With driving, I could tailor my departure time to my needs down to the minute. I believe that trucking companies are fulfilling a similar demand, just for goods rather than people.

When I traveled from Houston to Arizona by train back in 1980, I was extremely fortunate that the possibility emerged only three hours before the train left town. Had I missed that opportunity, I would have had to wait a whole day, and that would have eliminated that possible solution altogether. So, how often do you have to run trains in order to meet the needs of customers? Every hour? Every day? To provide enough trains to allow for the flexibility people now expect, you need a lot of passengers with a wide variety of desired departure times, or you end up moving a lot of empty trains. Even between DC and New York, the need to provide a schedule that can support flexibility has resulted in some trains that are mostly empty.

When I was working for another company, I was the national business development guy for a particular type of project, and that meant that I was flying to cities all over the country to help prepare and give presentations. Because this was business development, it was not time I could bill to a client, so the objective was to minimize its impact on my billable time as much as possible. So, I would fly to, say, San Jose or Orlando in the morning, give a presentation in the early afternoon, and be dropped at the airport by the local guy on the way back from the presentation. I'd get home around midnight (I lived in Dallas at the time and could fly back there from just about anywhere in the U.S. in an afternoon flight). I'd be at work the next day. Yes, it sucks, but I still enjoyed doing it during that time in my life, and that was the gig.

Back in the days when business travelers didn't mind taking the train for big cross-country trips, standards of productivity were MUCH lower than they are today. And, to be sure, business travelers didn't travel anywhere near as much as they do today, partly because of the difficulty in travel.

Hardly anybody goes to a barber any more. Few people wear shoes that need polishing. They are not traveling to travel, they are traveling because that's the only way to get there. If they are visiting distant family (a rarer concept in the "golden age" to which you refer), any time spent traveling is less time spent with their loved ones on the other end.

The traveling public has led the way to faster travel by demanding it. When a faster mode is available at a reduced cost, they take it. That more than anything killed general intercity train travel. Talking about the glory days of train travel (when trains were the faster mode) is like waxing poetic about traveling by stage coach. Amstage, anyone?

Each new mode of travel has made possible an economic breakthrough for the society that harnesses it. In ancient Rome, workers lived up to about 45 minutes of travel from their work. Their mode of travel was by foot, so ancient Rome was pretty small by modern standards. Then, many hundreds of years later, general public wealth improved to the point where the middle class (such as it was) could travel by horse. Cities got bigger, more productive, and more prosperous. We didn't have another breakthrough until trains came along, and trains for commutation fueled the industrial revolution in places like 1850's London. It made it possible for more industry to share a larger and more spread out pool of workers. London, a city that has existed since Roman times, got much bigger as a result.

The next breakthrough for commutation was the automobile. The economic benefit of the car is beyond calculation, even though we are now complaining about some of the consequences. Traffic jams are a sign of prosperity. Sometimes we have to take the bad with the good until something better comes along.

The car also provided the middle class with something they had not had in previous centuries: Freedom of travel. Don't underestimate the romance of that freedom.

When you blame the government for ignoring Amtrak, you miss the point, in my view. The point is that customers (except in a few places) abandoned passenger trains because they were not productive enough for their new requirements, or because they were too limited, or whatever. The government is just doing what the people ask for. They clamor at all levels for more and better roads. I have worked for both local and state government and now do contracting for the federal government, and I am quite close to transportation policy at the professional level (as opposed to the politician level, which will swing to and fro so fast that it can't support sustained policy). The clamor for more and better roads outpaces the clamor for more and better intercity trains by a factor of, oh, a million to one, at least at times when people are not panicking because of a rapid increase in gasoline prices. Even during the panic, people are still clamoring for more and better roads in local and state governments coast to coast, as we speak. To believe that government is unresponsive (at least eventually) to the clamor is to not understand government at all, especially in our system. Sluggish, yes. Incompetent, often. But attempts by government to go in a markedly different direction than what the people want usually result in "change elections".

As Edward Abbey wrote long ago, the real problem is population growth.

But that doesn't mean we can't do things better, or that there isn't a new transportation breakthrough just around the corner. High fuel prices will fund it, though, or at least make the market for it. My prediction: 1.) it won't require a fundamental rebuilding of the infrastructure, because that's just too expensive. That's the problem with Joe's wishful thinking. 2.) It won't expose people to the elements. 3.) It won't require people to move from the places they want to live. And 4.) it won't involve reviving an out-dated transportation mode that was already abandoned by travelers in favor of something more flexible and personal. We have already seen one possibility: Working from home. It only works for people who can do their work on computer, but even a small change in demand can have a big impact. Should we be investing in an Internet infrastructure to allow people to work at home effectively? The only reason I don't work at home more often is that I can't get high-speed internet service there.

Rick "who does not overestimate government's leadership or capabilities" Denney

[lgb&dtuba]

Actually, there's another reason altogether for the decline in long distance rail travel. And before I tell it I'm going to state that my grandfather, two uncles (blue collar) and my father (white collar) were all railroaders as was I for a few years (ask me how to rebuild a boxcar or run a station). I grew up hearing railroad chat. And participated in my own right.

Long distance passenger service hasn't been profitable since before WWII. Freight is much more profitable. It costs significantly more to maintain the tracks for passenger service than for freight. Passengers like a smooth ride. Passengers like a fast trip. Fast and smooth require a much better maintained set of tracks than is required for freight. Passenger service requires priority over freight. That costs the railroads in both wait time on freight trains and scheduling. Keep in mind that dispatchers scheduling trains have really only recently had computers to help with that.

When I was in the Navy back in the early 60's I used to "deadhead" between Portsmouth, VA and Wake Forest, NC on weekends. In those days you could ride the train for free if you wore your uniform. Many times I'd be the only person in the day coach. Both directions. In chatting with my family and the train crews I learned that the railroads had been trying for years before I was "deadheading" to eliminate passenger service in favor of freight. The federal government wouldn't let them. The railroads had to "prove" that passenger service wasn't profitable before they could drop passenger service.

One of the ways they ensured the lack of profitability was by refusing to maintain the passenger cars, lowering service, and generally discouraging people from riding the passenger trains. In general, most railroads were doing a bang up job of discouraging passenger traffic and "proving" lack of profits in passenger service. It was a chicken and egg situation. Maintenance was down because of "lack of profitability". Profits were down because people didn't want to ride in old, falling apart rail cars. And so on.

So much so that Amtrak came into being to consolidate passenger service under one "company". That company being the federal government. If the government hadn't mandated Amtrak long distance passenger service would have completely dissappeared years ago.

Keep in mind I'm talking about long distance passenger service. Not commuter rail in and around the relatively few cities that have it (and think they are the center of the world).

To this day the railroads don't really want to spend the money to maintain the roadbeds to passenger standards. The government forces them to do what they do. After all, the only real long distance passenger service is Amtrak and it doesn't own or maintain the rails it travels over.

Rail passenger service may be politically correct, but like most politically correct stances it completely ignores the economic realities involved.

Jim "I still miss riding trains" Wagner

[Donn]

Rail passenger service may be politically correct, but like most politically correct stances it completely ignores the economic realities involved.

Or like most politically correct stances, it recognizes realities that we've been ignoring. The time we spend behind the wheel sitting in traffic, so that we can enjoy the "convenience" of driving. The fossil fuels we burn, a non-renewable mineral resource, and the CO2 and other gases resulting from that combustion. Not to mention the carnage, grime, noise, visual blight, flooding from impermeable pavement, waste from disposal of vehicles, since for whatever reason those don't get mentioned so often. But they're all at some point economic realities, we've just become so accustomed to them that we see them as affordable, or costs already paid, unlike the train tracks we weren't thinking of laying down at relatively little cost. I don't see them as affordable, and the accelerating rate at which we build out that automobile dependent settlement pattern defies reality.