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.
That's relatively easy when he says: " to describe the role that rail network could play in a more efficient overall national transportation system. "
This does not mean that he diagnoses the Rail networks and industry as inefficient...but points to the RR networks as the component that can make the "overall national transportation system" "more efficient."
This is not linguistically a close call. This is straightforward and undeniable plain meaning of Gerard's study.
I have no issue with the idea that "There's always room for improvement, especially in rail."
But it still does not justify your earlier claim that disparaged Rail. Not by a longshot.
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.
Who is against efficiency? Not me. I am against a system which subsidizes imports over domestic production. And it sounds like we agree that the trucking industry is in fact a beneficiary of public subsidy by free use of the roads. So we don't need more of either you're saying?
I'm also amazed by the notion that greater domestic "production of goods" would be somehow benefit from a decrepit highway system.
Your ideas don't comport with what I advocate, and your intellectual confusion is palpable. You are ignoring the greater economic utility to the transportation system by a more balanced flow. To eliminate the gross waste of dead-heading which you completely omit in your attempts. And a large increase in domestic production of goods would also simultaneously reduce import demand by satisfying it internally. Less unbalanced and wasteful stress on the system.
You need to distinguish better between your hysterias.
That seems to be your problem.
One last thing: When I called your post no. 174 childish it was a statement of fact.
No. It was a statement of OPINION which you brazenly insist is fact. And it's an "out there" opinion at that.
You wrote, "B'wahahahahahahaha! TOTALLY BOGUS B.S."
Yes, one of the finer features of Free Republic is bringing down the haughty self-important to the level of us poor benighted plebians.
Then you call me a "cheap-shot provocateuer" and say I'm throwing "insult bombs" because I wrote that your post was childish?
You never supported your position...and all your articles still fail to support your position...as you say "there is always rooms for improvement." You fail to make a case for the extremist position of the Rail networks being dead. If you note, your own Norfolk story indicates there is an overcapacity problem. Not a deficiency. Not congestion. None of that. I was entitled to amusement at the mischaracterization, and was right to condemn the argument you made. I didn't condemn you personally. That is what you did. Ad hominem attacks, insults, and still no support for an extreme position. That's pathetic. You, my friend, are the excitable one around here, not I