The American government is no joke:
“Its original name was simply Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), but it was renamed DARPA (for Defense) on March 23, 1972, then back to ARPA on February 22, 1993, and then back to DARPA again on March 11, 1996.”
no responsesIn the minds of many transportation experts, Americans should be able to make relatively seamless transitions from one mode of travel to another within the same trip, and they should have choices as to which is the most efficient route. This is known as the intermodal ideal. The National Journal Online (NJO) covered this in a recent post called Are We Intermodal Enough Yet? After reading this (and I highly recommend it) I did some research.
Freight has made more steps toward intermodality, though industry propriety pervades and obstructs progress. The tractor-trailer rig is still wildly popular for many consumer goods and remains one of the most flexible and inexpensive ways to get things where they need to go, but the Association of American Railroads (AAR) argues that rail-to-truck is cheaper and more efficient than trucks alone:
On average, railroads are three or more times more fuel efficient than trucks. Today, railroads, on average, move a ton of freight 436 miles per gallon of fuel. If just 10 percent of the freight that currently moves by highway were moved by rail instead, fuel savings would exceed one billion gallons per year.
The American Trucking Associations (ATA) mentions truck combinations — two trailers on one tractor — as a way to increase efficiency. In fact, the president/CEO of the ATA serves on the board of experts for the National Journal’s Transportation section.
Notice a few things. First, trucking is an industry leader. Second, the AAR mentions a joint effort with trucking as a more efficient mode of transit. Third, the trucking industry mentions joining trucks together as their more efficient suggestion and never mentions rails. The ATA president argues in the Journal for more trucking. Each industry protects its own.
Intermodality doesn’t play out for travelers except for when they undertake it themselves, which is usually not very straightforward. Most of America is simply no longer covered by rail or bus for various reasons: Ronald Reagan deregulated bus transit along with many other industries, and when buses no longer had to travel to small towns they chose not to. If you wanted to travel from Reagan’s hometown to Chicago O’Hare Airport, you’d need to find a way to travel the first 50 miles on your own.
Moreover, is it efficient to take up runway space and air-transit dollars for planes flying between short-range destinations? One expert on the NJO string mentions high-speed rail as a cheaper route through corridors like Chicago-Indianapolis. Of course, the Simpsons and my father would suggest a monorail. But the point is a good one: Why can’t passenger travel work on the same principles as freight? Buses could dispatch to various locations in a 200-mile rural radius and deliver those people to a designated train station, where they’d be delivered at high speed to other cities or major airports.
FedEx Express has an interesting and deeply intermodal system for its services. It works like a coin sorter. Certain packages take only one flight to a FedEx regional hub. They then go onto a truck for delivery in the area. Other packages go to the hub, then take another flight, then go on the truck. This system works most comically for overnighting packages from, let’s say, Chicago to Indianapolis. It will fly to Memphis and then return.
Of course, if you send a package FedEx Ground, it will take the entire trip by tractor-trailer. There is no transshipment, no switch between modes of transport. The two branches of FedEx have nothing to do with each other and literally no overlap in services, which is why you see both brands on their own fleets of trucks.
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