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[quote user="greyhounds"]   Gee, you'd think a dentist hit a nerve.  I mean look at that response.  It's unbelievable.   I guess the truth hurts. And, as usual, Dave thinks he knows more than everybody - including the people at the Federal Reserve who write papers on economic issues.  If someone (in this case, the Surface Transportation Board) disagrees with him, he dismisses them as "hacks".  And, as usual again, he rewrites history to suit his needs. A clear example of his revision of history is when he references "forcing the BNSF to reduce its rates from two decades ago".  What the STB said was that the raillroads had achieved a productivity gains over a 20 year period and passed those productivity gains through to their customers because they clearly operate in a competitive environment.  Dave changes this around to something that happened 20 years ago instead of being an ongoing process over a 20 year period. He rants about trucking further to rail terminals.  In doing so he ignors the absolute fact that before rail deregulation as much as 39% of Montana wheat was trucked much further distances to the Snake River barge terminals.  The efficiency improvements of the BNSF have reduced trucking distances, not increased them as he falsely claims. [/quote] Well, explain to us how the federales can so blatantly contradict themselves?  One agency states absurdly that railroads operate in a competitive environment, then reps from the MFR state that 30% of rail shippers are captive.  You cannot have captive customers and a competitive environment at the same time.  Clearly, the STB report is weighted by AAR influence, not by classical economists who argue intuitively that an integrated rail system is a natural monopoly.  If railroads "clearly" have competition, then clearly there'd be more than one rail service provider for every stretch of track, because the only way to have clear intramodal competition is to have more than one operator on the only rail connection most rail shippers have.  This is the same guy who promotes the concept of "aggregation" when espousing the advantages of railroads, but conviently forgets about that key concept when stating his belief that trucks are competition for railroads.  Memo to Strawbridge:  Trucks do not haul aggregated units, they only haul single, sometimes double, and rarely triple units.  Ergo, a mode that cannot aggregate into large consists is no competition for the mode that can. And despite Ken's allusion to throngs of trucks hauling grain to Lewiston from the nation's grain fields, the fact remains that it is the individual farmers who now have to truck their grain farther and farther to the nearest railhead across the nation, not just Montana.  There's a world of difference between farmer owned trucks and standard OTR truckers.  Rarely if ever did you have OTR outfits taking the grain straight from the farm to Lewiston.  Most of the time, the farmer would truck via his own rig to the nearest local elevator, and it is the elevator operators who would decide whether to ship their grain onward via carload rail or OTR truckload to Lewiston.  Then we get *deregulation* and UP and BN start abandoning the lines to the elevators in favor of 26 and 52 car shuttle train facilities, then they stop service to the shuttle facilities in favor of consolidated 110 unit train terminals.  While all this is happening, the railroads move from 220k to 264k to 286k cars, while at the same time lobbying the feds to restrict increases in truck GVW.  What you get is the loss of the intermediate elevators the OTR's used to patronize, and the OTR's aren't going to shorthaul themselves from the remaining elevators to the unit train loaders, neither are they going to drive out in the farmer's fields and take the grain from farm to unit train facility, sot the farmer ends up having to buy his own road worthy trucks just to get his grain from farm to unit train facility.  Despite Ken's *expertise* on farming and trucking in Montana and the PNW, the farmer generally doesn't have the time to drive his own OTR rig from farm to Lewiston if he's farming in Montana or North Dakota. Get it through your head, Ken - today's farmers absolutely do have to truck their own grain in their own rigs exponentially farther today than 20 years ago, and this is entirely due to the railroads.  I should know - we farm, our neighbors all farm, and this is the reality that Ken ignores.
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