Why Railroads Matter
No technological replacement on the horizon is more efficient than railroads for moving heavy weight over land. Freight rail service remains essential to industrial, community, and environmental vitality. Yet, while new industrial development across North America surges, 90-95% is truck-only. We cannot continue sustainably while building out a truck-centric economy. However, we can no longer afford to pit rail and truck transportation against each other. It is time to shift to using each mode in concert rather than opposition. Rail and Trucking productivity and efficiency will improve from an integrated redesign of our transportation and industrial systems.
The physical strength of hard steel wheels rolling on rugged steel rails enables a dime-size contact patch between the two components. The benefits of this physics deliver even more than energy, fuel, and emissions savings. Railroads' energy efficiency creates space and capital efficiencies as well. They are space efficient in that a 100-car train can carry the goods of a 27-mile convoy of three hundred tractor-trailers on the highway. The implication of this significant carrying capacity extends to the quality of life for citizens adjacent to rail lines versus roadways. While each of the three hundred trucks passes every 30 seconds for 2.5 hours, the train passes in 4 minutes, providing 2 hours and 26 minutes of quiet.
Railroads’ capital efficiency is evident in numerous factors. The track, wheels, and railcars are long-lived and require much less maintenance and replacement than trucks, tires, and road surfaces. Tire wear, another critical friction cost, is the greatest source of microplastics in the oceans and air, with 18 tires on each truck causing a large portion of that pollution.
VitalRail is informed by OnTrackNorthAmerica’s Land Freight Lifecycle Impact Calculator, the world’s first side-by-side comparison of each land freight mode's long-term return on investment. After a year-long peer review, our underlying research for this tool was published on October 9th, 2024, in the “International Journal of Sustainable Transportation.” This calculator is a data-driven guide for shippers, planners, communities, and investors to assess infrastructure and logistics plans and investments properly. It is time to base infrastructure investment decisions on a sensible optimization of these fundamental principles of the earth’s physics and resources.
Understandably, most countries have made roads a primary target of public investment. But this has unwittingly provided trucking companies a business operating environment conducive to serving shippers of all sizes and locations without consideration of the overall return from land freight infrastructure investments. Trucking providers can relate to risk more flexibly as roads are provided for them and their customers, and road user taxes are paid on an as-you-go basis. Trucking operating costs can be further flexed to weather downtimes by reassigning or parking trucks and laying off drivers as needed.
Railroads and their shippers, on the other hand, require significant coordination before using rail, including long-term investment in rail lines, sidings, and loading facilities. The solution, however, lies not in focusing on greater public funding of freight railroads but in helpful improvements to policy, plans, and incentives that the government can provide to stimulate private-sector investment.
After all other modal measures are compared, such as ton-miles and cargo value, the most informative data point is the stark difference in annual gross revenues between North America’s freight rail and trucking industries─$115 billion compared to $1 trillion, an 8.7 times revenue disparity despite rail’s superior energy, space, and capital efficiency. Hence, a pent-up growth opportunity exists for the rail industry, its investors, and the industries and communities served. Stakeholder collaboration in VitalRail will unleash these tremendous benefits.
Demand for freight capacity will continue increasing as North America expands its efforts to re-shore manufacturing and address unstable global supply chains. With ongoing environmental issues and increasing road congestion and costs, this is an opportune time for railroads to align their business models with the urgent need for better and more sustainable supply chains. Rail transportation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 75%. As part of a growing rail industry, investors, infrastructure funds, shippers, and communities will provide ample capital for this growth strategy while enjoying a higher return on investment.
Freight transportation efficiency is a cause for the entire continent to rally behind!
