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From: jim on 18 Oct 2009 10:48 Scott in SoCal wrote: > > Last time on rec.autos.driving, "Dave C." <noway(a)nohow.never> said: > > >Not taking sides here, but I haven't actually seen a road not suitable > >for a heavy truck in the last forty years of driving. > > Sure, and because our tax money pays for all those nice roads the > Truckers get to drive on them for next to nothing. But I wonder how > competitive the trucking industry would be if they had to build and > maintain their own "truck" roads, as railroads do and have always > done? And if the trucking industry had to build its own roads, how > many trucking roads would they build out into BuFu Egypt? Your mind is completely taken over by fantasy. You exhibit absolutely no understanding of current economic reality. Open your eyes and look around the world is not at all like you imagine it to be. The world is now in the midst of a giant recession. The US government has committed trillions to bail out the pillars of the economic system. What was the cause of this recent economic downturn? Simply put, the cause of the disaster was Efficiency. A little over a year ago almost everyone suddenly decided to do things a little more efficiently than was previously customary and the result of efficiency was economic collapse. People simple deciding they are going to only drive when they really need to or purchase the things they really have a need for, turns out to be poison to the New World economic order. And it was not just people, the business world did the same thing. Businesses were suddenly looking at cutting every discretionary expense and shedding themselves of assets and workforce that was inefficient. And looking a little deeper, what was the inspiration for this sudden swerve toward shedding inefficiency and striving for efficiency? Obviously it was the cost of oil. It doesn't take too much thought to realize that the level of efficiency in almost all modern economic activity is directly tied to the cost of oil. So now after this moment of mass hysteria over high oil prices has started to fade from memory, the entire world is now fervently striving to restore the same level of inefficiency which we had become so comfortable with just few short years ago. And into this mess you step in and say that all we need to do is privatize the transport/road system and it will naturally find the most efficient means. I got news for you nobody is interested in efficiency. Anyone who has been paying attention this last year knows Efficiency is painful and dangerous. Any rational person knows it is to be avoided at all cost. If we wanted efficiency we wouldn't be spending trillions to restore inefficiency. -jim > > The fact is, trucking has an advantage due solely to government > subsidies. Take away those subsidies, force the trucking industry to > shoulder the full, true costs, and that advantage evaporates. As does > the whole "rails don't go where the shippers are" argument; if > trucking had to pay for its own roads, the truck roads wouldn't go to > those places, either.
From: Calvin Henry-Cotnam on 18 Oct 2009 12:01 Brent (tetraethylleadREMOVETHIS(a)yahoo.com) said... > >> I personally passed over a 5,000 pound weight restricted bridge in a >> vehicle that weighed over 78,000 pounds. > >ONCE. Your boss probably did 10 years or more of fatigue damage to that >bridge. It was likely damaged in ways that will probably only turn up on >an inspection. > >The bridge load rating is about what it can take in terms of hundreds of >thousands or millions of loading cycles and not be damaged. The damage >done by exceeding it is far worse than linear. Sure it didn't break, >because you loaded it once. Do that just a few hundred times and you're >probably sure to have a broken bridge. It's not the single loading, it's >the repeated loading and unloading that leads to failure. > >Steel has what is known as a fatigue limit, it's far far less than it's >ultimate stregth or even it's yield strength. If the stress remains >below the fatigue limit the structure will last forever (minus >environmental damage). The higher the stresses the fewer cycles the >structure will last before it breaks. Take that 78,000 lb truck and >drive it back and forth over that 5,000 lb rated bridge. You'll break >that bridge. > I have left the full text of Brent's explanation as it is good and I do not want to detract from this description of how failure limits work. I am wondering, though, if that "5,000 lb" rating for the bridge was a PER AXLE rating. Most, if not all, load limit notices posted around where I live are on a per axle basis. If that were the case and the truck in question had five or six axles, then its 78,000 lbs was a load of about 13,000 to 16,000 lbs - not as extreme as using the 78,000 lbs figure, but still above the posted limit, and likely to take its toll on the life expectancy of the bridge. Life is not black and white. There are extremes and there are all sorts of things that happen between those extremes. If a bridge is properly maintained and its designed load limit is never exceeded, it could possibly last forever. If a load above some absolute maximum level is placed on the bridge, it will collapse immediately. Between those two limits are situations that don't cause immediate failure, but decrease its life. Maybe that 78,000 lb truck represented a load that weakens the bridge to an extent that one can only drive such a load ten times over the bridge. If one does that nine times, one would be pretty convinced that it is okay to drive such a load over the bridge. Guess what happens to that false sense of security on the tenth trip? -- Calvin Henry-Cotnam "Unusual or extreme reactions to events caused by negligence are imaginable, but not reasonably foreseeable" - Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, May 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: if replying by email, remove "remove." and ".invalid"
From: Larry Sheldon on 18 Oct 2009 12:40 Dave C. wrote: > There are very few loads moving anywhere in the U.S. by any mode of > transport where both the shipper and consignee are near a railhead. There are a couple of things that amuse me about this discussion. Before I go on, let me say that I actually don't know anything about the economics of intermodal shipping beyond my speculations from what I see as a driver. One of the things is that I am pretty sure (but don't have a record to prove or disprove it) that I have picked up more empties at rail yards than I have loads. Seems pretty obvious to me that it is cheaper to ship no-revenue empties than it is to pay a driver to haul them. That actually makes sense to me, even if it does mean that the company has to own and pay for more trailers so it can have some tied up on the railroad. Lots of the loads I have hauled were car and truck parts--typically JIT, typically involving carriers (the have a name for those, escapes me at the moment). Seems clear that the manufactures don't want to pay for extra carriers (see "empties" above) and they don't want the delays. (Lotta the JIT stuff isn't manufactured until somebody orders it, having to wait 2 or 3 weeks for it to get there by rail just won't do.) And it turns out that you can't economically stop a train, off-load one trailer (ignoring for the moment the equipment needed to do that at every little town) and move on. So I find myself picking up a load at the Norfolk Southern yard in Kansas city and hauling it to Tennessee, or picking one up in Southern Indiana and hauling it to a terminal in Chicago. And not really related to any of that, but interesting--I live about 1/2 way between the BNSF main and the UP main. I don't see the BNSF line to often but I do see the UP line a lot--and it does not look like it can handle much more traffic--I see trains parked from here to North Platte,and sometimes they don't look like they move for days. ((Not parked--engines attached and running.)) And it would appear that there are maintenance issues--seems like there is a train on the ground somewhere nearby most of the time. Seven cars and an engine in Elkhorn last week.
From: Brent on 18 Oct 2009 13:01 On 2009-10-18, Dave C. <noway(a)nohow.never> wrote: > On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:26:53 +0000 (UTC) > Brent <tetraethylleadREMOVETHIS(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > >> On 2009-10-17, Dave C. <noway(a)nohow.never> wrote: >> > >> >> >> >> I am simply pointing out that the vast majority of the goods that >> >> need moving long distance don't need to be moved by trucks just >> >> because someone out in the middle of nowhere has a load every now >> >> and then that has to go to some place else out in the middle of >> >> some other nowhere. >> >> > There are very few loads moving anywhere in the U.S. by any mode of >> > transport where both the shipper and consignee are near a >> > railhead. >> >> I think 'near' needs to be defined. > > Fair enough. Let's say within 50 miles "as a crow flies". Keeping in > mind that driving distance is probably farther, I think that's a fair > definition of near. If we define near that way, 99% of loads of > cargo moving in the U.S. is not fit for rail. > > >> >> >> And you didn't address the problem of roads suitible for heavy >> >> trucks out in the middle of nowhere. >> >> > Not taking sides here, but I haven't actually seen a road not >> > suitable for a heavy truck in the last forty years of driving. >> > Some roads are posted to prohibit truck traffic, but that's just a >> > bullshit political NIMBY move that has nothing to do with the >> > road's suitability for heavy trucks. >> >> LOL. I've seen major routes (as in US highways and local arterial >> roads) where the pavement has been destroyed by heavy truck traffic. > The only roads I've seen crumbling badly are roads that haven't been > maintained since the 60's or so. And these are usually roads with very > little truck traffic. So if it was "destroyed" it was destroyed by a > combination of car traffic and neglect (especially neglect), and I'm > sure an occasional truck passing through didn't help much, either. Destroyed as in unsuitable for traffic. The pavement was crumbled, it was waved, distorted, as if it were turned to a fluid and then frozen. large rutted depressions several inches displaced from nominal. I don't think bicycles did that.
From: Brent on 18 Oct 2009 13:06
On 2009-10-18, Larry Sheldon <lfsheldon(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Lots of the loads I have hauled were car and truck parts--typically JIT, Just too late inventory systems are simply nonense that shifts the cost around and create stress where none should be. The idea was for the company doing the final assembly to decrease inventory costs. However, the suppliers making the parts often end up inventorying them anyway because of their own production capacities. The cost of that inventory is then passed on in the part cost. |