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Mookie: There is no war between trucks and trains -- if there every really was one. When you're in a regulated environment, it's a convenience to talk of a war, because you're fighting for position with the regulators in order to advance the position of your stockholders. If you paint the battle for regulatory advantage in terms of a war, it helps sway the uninformed to your side. And even now, while this fiction has lost most of its currency, its still used again for the same purpose with the government and with the public. No one uses it with shippers, because the shipper doesn't care and would regard such an argument as juvenile. Trucks and trains are just different flavors of the logistics business, and everyone in it is going to use the most cost-effective mode. There are plenty of people in the railroad business who used to be in the trucking business, and vice versa. It's all just business. The real question is economic value: which mode provides more in which lane for which commodity? And, just as important, how much do we (the public) want to insert taxpayer money to enhance the economic value of one or more modes? And, how much do we want to favor one mode in order to get other things we value -- such as safety, environmental quality, peace and quiet, and other things -- that are difficult to quantify in dollars? Right now, the public is continuing its decision to provide an open-access, taxpayer-provided highway system with no fixed costs for truckers and user fees that do not reflect true costs, while at the same time hoping that railroads can continue to provide a high fixed-cost, franchise-based system that doesn't pay for itself. As we can see, this huge input of taxpayer money has shifted the economic value decision toward trucks in many commodities and lanes since the 1920s. (This is not necessarily a bad thing; the advent of trucking has had huge economic benefits and greatly increased wealth in this country.) Every shipper is going to pick the best solution, and if the public wants to give you (the shipper) money, you're not going to turn them down. Your competitor won't! The public can change its mind at any time. Whatever the public decides to do is their decision to make, not mine, not this magazine's, and not a trucking or railroad companys'. All we do in Trains is point out the outcomes of any given policy. One outcome of the current policy is that it is causing disinvestment in railroads, through such things as abandonment and extraction of cash, which is given to investors to put into other businesses which presumably have a better long-term outlook. Maybe the public doesn't NEED railroads, in which case this decision is fine. If they do, then this decision is not so fine. Before anyone decides to put taxpayer money into a transportation mode, or take it out, they might want to decide what kind of an America they want to live in. The decisions made about transportation will influence these decisions and their outcomes. I would merely add that the continued abandonment of rail mileage and the continued loss of rail market share will probably result in increased logistics costs to the U.S. taxpayer -- that is, a lower standard of living. Since the highway system is paid for through fuel taxes -- and a middle class person burns about as much gas as a rich person -- the burden for the highway system will not be based proportionately on income. That may or may not bother you. Please note that I am not choosing sides here, nor advocating any policy, or anything of the sort. It's up to you what you want out of America, not me.
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