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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding Just what is broken that we are trying to fix with open access? [/quote] I would use the word "unsatisfactory" as opposed to "broken". It can be argued more or less that railroads are under performing or contributing in a negative way (from a perspective of a national transportation policy standpoint) in the following catagories: 1. Ton/mile freight market share 2. Total freight revenue market share 3. Customer responsiveness 4. Service to captive shippers 5. Optimization of the theoretical "railroad advantage" over other transportation modes, e.g. moving bulk commodities at speed 6. Sufficient ease of entry for new transportation service providers 7. Staying on the cutting edge of rail technology innovation 8. Garnering a sufficient cost of capital recovery 9. Railcar utilization (see "one carload per month" post) 10. Following through on the AAR matra of "getting trucks off the highways" 11. Contributing to the trade deficit rather than aiding in trade deficit reduction 12. Too little capacity funneled into too few rail corridors (e.g. not enough dispersed redundancy, setting up a scenario of an economically catastrophic rail corridor shut down) 13. Lack of multimodal synchronicity with barge lines and short sea shippers 14. Creating bottlenecks due to selective line abandonments 15. Creating paper barriers to connecting shortlines, effectively minimizing the captive shortline's ability to expand their market reach IOW, you have to be satisfied with minimilist performance to aver that today's railroads are "doing just fine". OA is only for those who want something much better.
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