Not to mention the societal benefits of putting more freight on rails and replacing long-distance truck traffic on highways -
State officials are thinking even bigger: a study sponsored by the Virginia DOT finds that a cumulative investment over ten to twelve years of less than $8 billion would divert 30 percent of the growing truck traffic on I-81 to rail. That would be far more bang for the state's buck than the $11 billion it would take to add more lanes to the highway, especially since it would bring many other public benefits, from reduced highway accidents and lower repair costs to enormous improvements in fuel efficiency and pollution reduction. Today, a single train can move as many containers as 280 trucks while using one-third as much energy - and that's before any improvements to rail infrastructure.
First, the general arguments before I get more specifically into what an upgraded intermodal transport system centered on a modern national freight rail network can do for our food systems:
While the demand is currently there...
Once reduced to transporting mostly heavy, low-value commodities such as coal, railroads started gaining business in the transport of more time-sensitive, high-value items-everything from Japanese computers to California wine-typically using containers double stacked on flat cars. On routes where they still have adequate infrastructure, railroads have won back fantastic amounts of business from trucks, especially on long hauls such as Los Angeles to New York, where railroads now have a 72 percent market share in container traffic and could have more. Railroads have gone from having too much track to having not enough. Today, the nation's rail network is just 94,942 miles, less than half of what it was in 1970, yet it is hauling 137 percent more freight, making for extreme congestion and longer shipping times.
...and increasing, the freight rail companies don't currently have the capacity to keep up with demand. And they are nowhere near living up to potential. At least at first, improvements in our rail infrastructure are going to have to be heavily publicly funded. Why?
America's major railroad companies are publicly traded companies answerable to often mindless, or predatory, financial Goliaths. While Wall Street was pouring the world's savings into underwriting credit cards and sub-prime mortgages on overvalued tract houses, America's railroads were pleading for the financing they needed to increase their capacity. And for the most part, the answer that came back from Wall Street was no, or worse. CSX, one of the nation's largest railroads, spent much of last year trying to fight off two hedge funds intent on gaining enough control of the company to cut its spending on new track and equipment in order to maximize short-term profits.
We obviously haven't learned much from last century, when we sat idly by while General Motors destroyed our once vast nationwide network of streetcar and trolley systems...
So the industry, though gaining in market share and profitability after decades of decline, is starved for capital. While its return on investment improved to a respectable 8 percent by the beginning of this decade, its cost of capital outpaced it at around 10 percent-and that was before the credit crunch arrived. This is no small problem, since railroads are capital intensive, spending about five times more just to maintain remaining rail lines and equipment than the average U.S. manufacturing industry does on plant and equipment. Increased investment in railroad infrastructure would produce many public goods, including fewer fatalities from truck crashes, which kill some 5,000 Americans a year. But public goods do not impress Wall Street. Nor does the long-term potential for increased earnings that improved rail infrastructure would bring, except in the eyes of Warren Buffett-who is bullish on railroads-and a few other smart, patient investors.
It should be mentioned here that rail's major competitor when it comes to moving freight, highways, are funded by taxpayers. The rail companies have to build and maintain their own infrastructure. WalMart and the other Boxes were publicly subsidized in their destruction of countless towns, cities and local economies by sending their trucks all across America on highways built and maintained by you and me; and did so using one of the most wasteful, inefficient, environmentally destructive modes of transport in human history.
On the other side, rail transportation has many inherent advantages in its very nature -
Rail transport lacks the flexibility of the rubber wheel kind, but it has other advantages that make it far superior when the circumstances allow. The biggest is a unique quality of the technology itself. Steel wheels on steel rails meet with very little rolling resistance. They don't compress and absorb energy from the surface the way a tire does, and the rail itself is much smoother than any road, so trains have only about one-tenth the rolling resistance of trucks. And because of the way rails absorb and spread the weight of a vehicle over long distances, this advantage increases as freight is added. The more you load up a train, the more efficient it becomes compared to a fleet of trucks carrying the same cargo.
Anybody who's ever driven from Portland, OR to Oakland, CA on I-5, especially the stretch from south of Eugene along the mountains into Northern California, should have a very good idea of just how ridiculous it is to run freight on trucks through that region. A Union Pacific freight line literally shadows the Interstate the whole way, and with a bit of financing to upgrade that stretch of rail we could replace much of that freight currently being transported on the highway.
The alternative is for the public to help pay for rail infrastructure. Actually, it's not much of a choice. Unlike private investors, the government must either invest in shoring up the railroads' overwhelmed infrastructure or pay in other ways. Failing to rebuild rail infrastructure will simply further move the burden of ever-increasing shipping demands onto the highways, the expansion and maintenance of which does not come free. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (hardly a shill for the rail industry) estimates that without public investment in rail capacity 450 million tons of freight will shift to highways, costing shippers $162 billion and highway users $238 billion (in travel time, operating, and accident costs), and adding $10 billion to highway costs over the next twenty years. "Inclusion of costs for bridges, interchanges, etc., could double this estimate," their report adds.
That's money we don't have, and even if we did we shouldn't be using it to temporarily prop up an outdated mode of transportation that was never very efficient in the first place, even back during the age of abundant cheap oil.
From there the article goes on into specifics of what can be done for right now - citing examples of current choke-points in Baltimore and Chicago, the importance of electrification on mountainous lines and the potential uses of wind to power passenger and freight trains crossing the Great Plains, and looks at what's being done in terms of improved passenger rail service in England and on Amtrak's Virginia - Orlando AutoTrain route, amongst other examples. Longman presents a solid case to the incoming Obama administration that the benefits and public goods that will be reaped by investment in upgrading our rail infrastructure will go far beyond the initial dollar value, and an improved national rail system will clearly provide the most "bang-for-the-buck" in the long and short term.
The whole article is definitely worth reading.
On to food...
The international commerce system as we know it was built upon trading tea and spices. There's no need to give up coffee if it's done in a sustainable manner; and when it is done in such a manner, it can actually contribute to improving ecosystems. Shipping goods by sea can be one of the most energy efficient methods possible; and spices, teas and coffee beans are well-suited to train travel.
The same goes for regional shipments of nuts, grains and flour. And if rail infrastructure upgrades are publicly financed, that can also open the way to allowing other companies to run freight along those lines and reduce the problems of monopoly pricing present in the current system.
I enjoyed reading "Plenty" and other books like it as literature, but certainly not as the "how-to" guides that many seem to have mistaken them for. I don't believe we need to limit ourselves to such arbitrary numbers when it comes to setting definitions of what a sustainable food system can and should be. There's no need to give up coffee or chocolate when it's produced, shipped and distributed the right way...the same goes for many other spices and crops that can only ever be grown under certain very specific conditions and in certain specific places.
But at the same time, I think we'd all agree that it's ridiculous that the Safeway down the block from me carries organic apples from New Zealand in November, when local Pacific Northwest apples are still at their peak.
An improved freight rail system can help us distribute coffee, teas, spices, etc throughout our country from seaports on both coasts in a much more sustainable manner than the current system of fossil fuel dependent long-haul trucks on our decrepit interstate highway systems. The same goes for the distribution of in-season citrus fruits from California, Florida and Texas throughout the rest of the country -
We also have the chance to reduce drastically the cost and huge carbon footprint of using trucks and planes almost exclusively to ship perishables across the country. Until the 1970s, railroads handled nearly all fresh food movement from California and Florida, and could again, making healthy winter fruits and vegetables cheaper, and less hard on the planet.
Now, the author certainly isn't making a case for eating locally and seasonally. But we can't overlook the very real benefits that a high-speed modern national freight rail network can deliver to us in every way, including in our local and regional food systems.
Strategically placed modern freight rail hubs can serve as intermodal transport centers for local growers and ranchers to get their products out to local and regional markets at much less environmental and economic cost than the current trucking system. Cities and towns can begin to reintroduce permanent year-round indoor public markets (like Seattle's Pike Place, San Francisco's Ferry Building, Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, and etc..) and open up new markets and opportunities for local farms and ranches, while affording people easier access to healthy local and seasonal whole foods year-round. With enough of an investment, we can make it so that a farmer in Central Washington would only have to drive their products 15 or 20 miles to the nearest rail terminal, rather than having to drive the whole 150 or 200 miles to a Seattle market.
The rail lines are, for the most part, still out there everywhere. We just have to bring them up to date, and begin to utilize them fully. But we're going to need major and bold leadership from DC on the issue. Will we see it? I'd like to hope that we will, but the early indications are that state highway departments and asphalt contractors are currently rubbing their hands together in glee while imagining one more massive lane-widening orgy. Is the new administration interested in a long-term sustainable solution to our national infrastructure to bring America on par with almost every other advanced nation in the world, or are we going to waste billions more yet again on temporarily propping up a proven failure of a system from a bygone era?
Is all this politically feasible? Certainly more so than a year ago, before the consensus formed that we must invest massively in infrastructure of some kind. Importantly, too, we're not talking about bailing out a failing industry, but about helping an expanding, more energy-efficient one to grow fast enough to meet pressing public needs. Nor would we be making big bets on unproven technology.
Only time will tell, I guess. We'll find out soon.
At least we know that the thoughtful, responsible adults will soon be returning to DC once again... |
