False.
Indeed, that author supports my arguments.
False. Root and branch.
He doesn't even allude to "your arguments." Your trying to contort his report into such is simply dishonest reading. E.g., when Gerard discusses options for making things "more efficient" he does not presuppose or confirm anything you said, nor corroborate your recommendations. He is making the case for a migration back from truck to rail.
Which has nothing to do with instead installing a "SuperCorridor" from Mexican ports clear up to Duluth. The slowing rate of railway expansion, relative to truck-borne traffic, is not a function of either productive or allocative efficiency.
to describe the role that rail network could play in a more efficient overall national transportation system.As for your dismissal of the articles I cited, I'll do some of your homework for you. Here, from the Norfolk-Southern piece:
Norfolk's logistics--involving the use of algorithms that search for the shortest routes, fastest tracks and fewest handlings--essentially got the trains to run on time. Remarkably, that hoary concept had been ignored by the industry until Norfolk made it a priority. Just a few Norfolk advances: Carload volume is up 14% since 2000, but the number of cars needed to move that volume has dropped 11%. Average speed is up 7% to 22 miles per hour. Average time in the yard, called dwell time, is down 7% to 23 hours.There's always room for improvement, especially in rail. The efficiencies that McCullough cites are in physical plant and labor. Norfolk-Southern has, in addition to those, gone at that horribly lacking area of the rail industry in dispatch, which presents an inherent disadvantage to rail over trucking. But, finally, rail can only do so much when it comes to meeting that balance between mass and individual shipment priority. It's like asking buses to get people to their homes better than cars. The only way to accomplish it would be to degrade the automobile routes, for the bus routes could never reach those met by automobiles.
Indeed, Norfolk's system is so far ahead of other railroads' that it sells its software to rivals. The ultimate competition, after all, is trucks. All of this has made Norfolk's recent performance recall the Jay Gould era: Its revenues grew 17% during the most recent four quarters (through September 2005) to $8.2 billion. Profits have grown 66%, from $700 million to $1.2 billion. Norfolk Southern's discipline gives it the best net margins of the U.S. railroads. Its 14% bests Burlington Northern's 12%, CSX's 11% and Union Pacific's 6%. The company's share price is up 85% since the beginning of 2004.
As the Forbes article notes, rail's efficiency gains have been in desperation at the flogging rail has taken from trucking:
Norfolk, like the rest of the railroad industry, spent a half-century in a siege mentality, slouching along by shrinking and slashing costs, tangled in rat's-nest mergers and wrestling with its featherbedding unions. In 1955 a million people worked for the big U.S. railroads; now just 160,000 do (29,000 at Norfolk). Yet while productivity boomed--ton-miles moved per employee have increased to 11 million from just 600,000 in 1955--the industry was unable to raise prices from 1980 to 2004. It suffered from overcapacity and bad service, and the newly deregulated trucking industry was siphoning customers. It was rare when a large railroad earned even its cost of capital.And we haven't even gotten into the larger historical problem with rail, which is of a similar issue that highways face today, government regulation. Rail was reinvented in the 1980s by Reagan's deregulation. Trucking, too, only trucking now faces the additional burden of government ownership of the land it runs on, which rail does not. The government long ago ceded that land to the railroads. It can do the same for highways now.
The trucking industry is adamant against tolling and direct user-fees. In opposing it, it is condemning itself to congestion, higher taxes, and a degraded road system. If the railroad industry wants to take market share from trucking, it can do no better than to wish for more of the same from the highway system. The worst scenario for rail is highway innovation.
As for your core problem with the Texas road that it may be "facilitating still more imports of goods..." I can only wonder how you process the fact that rail feeds the import frenzy as much as trucking. I'm also amazed by the notion that greater domestic "production of goods" would be somehow benefit from a decrepit highway system. You need to distinguish better between your hysterias.
One last thing: When I called your post no. 174 childish it was a statement of fact. You wrote, "B'wahahahahahahaha! TOTALLY BOGUS B.S." Then you call me a "cheap-shot provocateuer" and say I'm throwing "insult bombs" because I wrote that your post was childish?
That's pathetic. You, my friend, are the excitable one around here, not I.