I’m pretty sure rails can actually handle being jnmaintained a lot better then roads can as well (just so long as they don’t end up like how Penn centrals network did)
The U.S. built its economy (and its superpower status) because it has more miles of interconnected navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined-free infrastructure that doesn’t ever need to be maintained and is more efficient than even rail
@@evboto.5597 more river and canal transport would be interesting. But you'd still need road or rail at some points. The rivers and canals didn't go everywhere
@@Mecrom The reason why we use trucks for so many things now is because a.) Jones Act (the dumbest law the U.S. has ever enacted) b.) our goods are more high value-added so what method of transport is used dosent matter as much as it used to, and c.) the extreme aging and disrepair of the waterway infrastructure. Replacing ALL the U.S.’s waterway infrastructure will cost less than $300 billion and if Jones Act is repealed a lot more goods will use our waterways even with the extreme aging of our infrastructure
Spotted a small mistake. You said Switzerland has most of their mainlines electrified. Actually Switzerland is the only country with 100% electrification.
Taiwan/ROC also now has most of its mainlines electrified (after the one along its rural east coast was a few years back) though I also imagine that it helps that its' network doesn't have much branching, which could simplify the planning & projects needed
Yes because using hydroelectricly powered trains reduce the dependency of us to our shit neighbours. We absolutely realized this during the Great War and its hardships imposed onto the swiss people. It holds true even today. Maybe even more so now that they are "unified" in one obnoxious blob of toxicity. Its almost as bad as 1940-45. At least back then there were some countries fighting them.
I'm a trucker, and I absolutely LOVE my job. I want to do this until the day I retire (in 50-ish years). Yet, I absolutely agree with everything you say. We should absolutely move more stuff by trains than by trucks. The amount of trucks on the roads doing long-hauls instead of trains doing them are mind-boggeling.
@@rust8infinite I'm concerned about the future and the climate impact all of these trucks have. I'm in my mid 20s, and have a lot ahead of me. Besides, it isn't feasible to have the train go everywhere. My job is to pick up a container by the train depot, and drive around delivering to the local grocery stores.
@@hatsjer dont be concerned about “climate impact” I’m older then you and they’ve been claiming this nonsense the whole time. There is not going to be a “catastrophe” or an “apocalypse” At most there will have to be adaptations like constructing more aquifers and sea walls
@@eriknervik9003 To say nothing of all the species, plant, animal, and fungi that are being catastrophically impacted by, not just heat and water level stresses, but the pollutants in their circulatory systems from among other things, exhaust gasses, runoff from roads, extraction, and tailings fields. Of the huge swaths of habitat destroyed by parking lots and inefficient buildings, never mind the other effects both of those things have on their surrounding environments. Stop trying so much harder to find excuses than in finding the true context for all of the impacts of industrialization and population growth; oh, and growing energy demands per capita as industrialization progresses.
@@weatheranddarkness While we shouldn’t be careless as to such things, soecies go extinct all the time and there is no moral obligation to prevent the extinction of any one species. Humans take priority.
@Gustav there still will be a large amount of regional truck traffic especially inland. But the long coast to coast journeys that are currently performed by trucks needs to be cut out
@Gustav It is not a problem. As a country matures, every country eventually enters a phase of population reduction. Japan, china, korea, all have them. US is an exception because of influx of people. Automation becomes a necessity.
@Gustav Depends on the country, here in the uk we have to source a lot of our drivers from abroad, as we simply don't have enough truck drivers in the uk alone.
@@guicho271828 "It is not a problem"... as long as you're not a truck driver, or someone working one of the many other occupations that the trucking industry creates. Just reduce the population of those undesirables, right comrade? You're fucking sick.
I love using Switzerland as a comparison to the US when talking about rail transport, because it has a similar population as New Jersey, while having twice the land area. It points to how density isn't the only thing holding back public transit in the US.
Switzerland has a great train network, but trucks are still heavily used. Post offices are mainly serviced by trucks, and a lot of international mail is trucked in. Passenger rail has the priority, and rail is not always the cheapest option. Switzerland has however made a plan (which has been approved) to reduce trucks by building an underground autonomous transportation system just for frieght. www.cst.ch/en/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_Sous_Terrain ruclips.net/video/htTo-_5X8gA/видео.html
I am a Swiss car driver. I have always taken our cargo system for granted. But when I drive abroad (Germany, Italy etc.). I notice how many cargo trucks are around. I hate it. They turn a 3 lane highway into a 2 lane one. Because they occupy the right lane all the time. When one cargo truck overtakes another, we have a single lane highway. On a 2 lane highway, we have a rolling roadblock. Then I realize how grateful I am that our cargo train system is so good. I rarely see a cargo truck on Swiss roads.
I remember the highway nightmare from when I went to Europe (outside of Switzerland at least). You had a right lane jammed full of trucks going 80 kph making it difficult to merge onto the highway to begin with, then you had to wait for a big enough gap where you could safely merge into the rest of the traffic, often going at least 130 kph. Then you got to do it all in reverse once you were ready to get off the highway.
I live near a large city which has a mostly 2 lane interstate heading to another large city in the us. It is a major shipping route where I would bet 80% of the traffic on the interstate is trucks. They are now increasing over 10 miles of the interstate to 3 lanes because of the traffic, when they could have just made the left lane trucks only and solved the problem entirely. Just a couple weeks ago a man was crushed between two semis which transferred all trucks to the two parallel roads in the town in which I live (which happens anytime there is a wreck. It basically makes it impossible to go anywhere at all, and sometimes they often consider cutting schools short to allow the buses extra time. The irony: We have a direct train line partially grade separated running parallel to the interstate, with a speed limit of 80, cutting 1/4 of travel time in the best of times for the interstate, despite that we have only about 6 trains a day come through. Physically and time-wise there is no reason why the trains should run more. It is simply the subsidization of highways and efficiency of loading freight to trains.
Meanwhile Singapore ended rail freight/cargo in 2011 as it was run using tracks owned & operated by neighbouring Malaysia's nat'l operator KTM, having been built when both countries were British Crown Colonies (but then Singapore got expelled from Malaysia in 1965), so Singapore complained that was impinging its sovereignty. Which probably came back to bite it during the pandemic as the gov't required truckers from Malaysia into Singapore to be tested at the border crossings, & they'd have to wait there too for the test results, leading to jams that also involved 3500 chickens dying in the back of a lorry (due to heatstroke as they weren't given water, since the lorry's company hadn't expected the journey to take so long). The no. of drivers needed & thus the testing needed could've been reduced if the cargo was transported by rail instead (with perhaps a new cargo-handling terminal built near the border, to address sovereignty concerns). Eventually the government had to give truckers priority for vaccination too to prevent our supply chains from being paralyzed
A lot of trucks that need to go from Italy to Germany, they don't go through Switzerland, they go through Austria or France, due to the price of the toll roads. This is why you don't see a lot of trucks in Switzerland.
We are noticing this here in Australia too. Many rail lines have been shut down (mainly in rural areas) forcing hundreds if not thousands more trucks onto roads that were already terrible. If that isn't bad enough, the government basically refuses to fix them and the local councils don't have enough money to do it themselves. Bring back the trains
I work at a warehouse. We are LITERALLY right next to a train track, but our warehouse wasn’t built with a railroad. Knowing that this is even an option now really makes me mad
When I understood the weakness of concrete... it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. Aspired for the purity of the blessed machine. For the machine is very energy efficient.
It helps that Switzerland is only 15k square miles and almost entirely land without large bodies of water and has a high population density. For reference 41/50 states in the US are larger than the entire country of Switzerland. 40/50 are more than double its size, and 31/50 are more than triple its size. The biggest state in the union (Alaska) is 38 times the size of Switzerland
Its not so crazy, if you think of the source of electricity. Bavaria also ran a lot Electric trains, cause they could get cheap electricity by water power.
i worked for fedex express for about a year, I was amazed at the inefficiencies that were common place to facilitate our priority overnight packages. our routes were practily run twice, just to get priority pakages done first.
Work at FedEx corporate Canada. Overnight express is a marvel. They need to do anything in there power to make sure it gets delivered or they lose money on the shipment. Having your package go from Toronto to Vancouver within a single day is mind blowing.
It makes sense to me that the priority packages would be inefficient logistically, since the customer has to pay a large premium for the delivery to be so fast. Assumedly the customer is in a dire need for the product in that instance, and that need outweighs the downside of inefficient delivery.
Former USPS employee here. That was pretty much the same thing with our Priority Mail Express packages. Like, pretty much everyone pays attention when that ding goes off on the overhead package scanner in the office, more often than not one of the carriers would be assigned to run _all_ of the express packages while the main carrier focused on the everything-else, you had to sign out every express you took, and you would get in BIG trouble if it was late (since missing the deadline by even a minute auto-refunds the postage to the sender).
Ah, that must be why when I look at the tracker for packages (I don't remember if it was FedEx or UPS), it will show me that the truck with my package on it is literally less than 100 feet away, but my package won't be delivered for another 4-6 hours. After that they end up driving all the way out of the county and back before it's delivered.
@@wrob08 That's part of it, yes. I have people make comments to me all the time because they'll see I'm less than a mile away but it takes 6 hours or so to get to them. It's because a typical delivery driver has about 120-250 stops depending on the route. Sometimes I'll have 200 stops in one single neighborhood alone. So I might be less than a mile away but there's still 199 stops between me and that customer's house
Anyone who has played any game with trains will know that, while much harder to set up and a big pain in the ass, once set up they are AMAZING at transporting in bulk and the fact we don't use trains as much as we should is a crime.
Honestly it's a pretty simple logical conclusion, a truck can haul a single trailer sometimes 2 versus trains hauling dozens that alone should be more than enough to incentivize using trains over trucks.
As a freight conductor I get to see the abandoned spurs and industry leads everyday. It's sad how much we've lost. What it really comes down to is cost. Trucking is cheap because we subsidize it so much. Add a VMT that actually pays for the damage trucks are doing and some of the tonnage will shift back to rail. The STB will also have to crack down on PSR and zoning will have to be updated to include rail spurs, as Alan said, for this to really take off.
I do not know where you all are getting your information, trucking is not, NOT SUBSIDIZED. THE trucks pay more in road tax, use tax, fuel tax, tolls, insurances, etc. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A TRAIN DELIEVER TO MY HOUSE OR ANYONE ELSES HOUSE. YOUR INFORMATION IS SOOOOO FLAWED.
@@greenbeenie2 My friend, let me start by saying, is Conrail? Let me follow with the following: it is not direct subsidization of which he speaks. Roads, highways, and other infrastructure used by trucks is paid for using taxes and money from the government. In the case of rail, the 'road' aka tracks are owned by the companies using them. The subsidization in this case is that government is paying for the infrastructure.
Bless you for your work and keeping rail alive. I hope for the VMT to go into effect so trucks and companies will actually start paying for the roads they damage. I shouldn't have to pay more to fix streets where I live, doing 1/10,000th of the road damage as a trucking company, paying zero taxes to fix the roads, passing through and creating the potholes in the first place.
@@greenbeenie2 Did you even watch the video? Trucks do 99% of the wear and tear, but only 35% of the taxes. Also taxes from vehicles aren't enough for their cost and roads end up being subsidized by other taxes. I've also never had a freight truck deliver to my house because that's dumb. The last-leg delivery is almost always vans. I think you're the one with flawed logic here.
A lot of people in the US and Britain who advocate for rail modernisation seem to think freight traffic is the enemy, oddly. But this video is a great explanation why it's not.
as long as it's kept on a separate track so passenger trains and go speeding past them or they move the same speed as passenger trains they can work fine with little to no delays from them.
Meanwhile, I look at the Bay Ridge Branch in Brooklyn (no, seriously, I can just look right out the window) and I imagine a mixed passenger/freight line where all trains run on electricity (it's currently used just for diesel-hauled freight, but it once had passenger service as well as electrification and could reclaim both in the future). The Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel -- a project that's decades in the making -- would only help to improve logistics, which is especially important because Long Island's only direct connections to anything else are all in NYC.
The big problem is what most politicians see has rail modernisation is 250kmh plus railways and indead rail freight dosent fitt in that (were did the high speed mail train idea go? ). Meanwhile cargo rail gets overlooked in most cases even in the railfreight paradises like Switzerland The new tunnels are all 2 track only so alot of the cargo trains end up on the old mountain tracks
The reason why is that Freight Trains are the ones that get in the way of passenger trains and since the track is owned by that Freight company, the passenger train ALWAYS has to wait, so it's easy for fans of passenger trains, like me, to hate Freight Trains
It's all about incentives. If you free market the roads as well, road owners would incur higher costs from trucks to pay for maintenance, driving shipping to trains. Theoretically, at least.
As a locomotive engineer with 20yrs of service I can say with 100% confidence that the problem is that the railroads do not see themselves as a customer service industry. They see it as the customers work for them rather than them providing a service to the customers.
If I were a corporate raider with access to several billion dollars I would take over CSX and could probably increase their profits just by being reasonable.
Working in an Amazon warehouse was probably the lowest I've ever felt in my whole life. Thankfully I only did it for a few months and had options to leave, saw alot of people stuck working there because they were afraid of losing benefits
"That parking slot is crazy, how on earth a parking is bigger that the entire facility" About 75% of shopping centers have the same feature. The further from a city, the cheaper the land.
@@xalex7923 Try getting out of a large city. Even mid-sized cities have more land for parking than the building. If they don't have parking, they don't have customers. And suburban drivers avoid paid parking like the plague.
Speaking from personal experience here. I farm near Union Pacific Global IV. It's a massive intermodal facility where UP unit container trains are loaded and unloaded. The road traffic is so heavy that all of the intersections near the yard have Oregon trail sized ruts in the lanes that trucks use. Due to the tax revenue that the yard generates local legislators make no effort to force the UP or the warehouses to make necessary infrastructure improvements. (oh and they're going to build even more warehouses without rail connection). Keep freight on the rails for local delivery! Chicago used to do this so well, and now most of the Chicago short-lines are bought up, dead, or dying. This is definitely a rant, but the topic is very important to me.
The giant IC and PRR freighthouses right downtown were torn down and local freight moved to the highways. And yet now the Class I's traffic is what also prevents Metra and Amtrak from providing good service in many places. In other words, nationalization is the future lol
@@bipbipletucha the best services every provided were private. NYC, PRR, etc. All private. Costs were low because they competed heavily. Now explain why someone should take a 48 hr train ride from NYC to SF vs a 6 hr flight. There's your problem.
@@DebatingWombat the video suggests freight delivery e.g. 2 day shipping is a primary cause of crumbling infra when the majority of vehicles are passenger based. Trucks can't come off the roads the concentration just moves to local delivery even with more trains as the good still requires delivery. My local CSX yard doubles in size every 5 years. 10 yrs ago it never changed ever. From the CSX yard chemical containers are interchanged and freight is placed on trucks to distribution centers including Amazon where goods go out for local delivery. The freight costs are pretty low already since there is comp between CSX, CP Rail, and NS. Nationalizing freight artificially reduces costs as they would be subsidized via taxes so our shipping costs just moved they didn't decrease. I'd rather have competition to drive prices vs the government choosing prices. But bring back competition so new companies could exist. There were hundreds of companies 50 yrs ago. There's what 5 now? I've got 1000s of dead track mileage around me in NYS including old distribution centers. We have politics that prevent say Amazon buying an old distribution center with direct rail service and refurbishing it but CSX can scale what they already own. There's 0 service to the Adirondacks. Frieght goes straight to Montreal. Again politics block creating those distribution centers north of me so trucks are the only option. Even the rails going to a large stone quarry were removed because the customers are all local now. Passenger vehicles could be reduced vs moved with better rail svc. This is where a real difference could be made. NYC is a 3.5 hr drive with traffic from me. 2.5 via train and there's no tolls. But I can only access a train 2x/wk and a tix costs $150 through nationalized Amtrak. Privatize profitable passenger traffic and now vehicles could come off the roads. Amtrak is nationalized and the service is terrible so road traffic remains high, breaking down the infra. That's why I bring up passenger service.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy how the cost of roads is shared between everyone in the country, yet the cost of rails is paid only by the owner/user. So taking the bolt bus is always cheaper than amtrak, even though it's less energy efficient.
@@sciencecw buses carry many people yes, but trains carry far far more. In terms of energy efficiency, its quite simply the lower rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel track that win out against rubber tires on asphalt. Buses may have lower capital costs, only because road infrastructure is funded by all taxpayers while railroads need to build their own track. This is more of a socio-economic inefficiency that we need to reconsider
@@dxkaiyuan4177 tracks and rail ROW are more expensive. That's why rail only has economy of scale in big cities. They also have a large carbon footprint
@@sciencecw Do you have data on the carbon footprint argument? Cause I'd guess when talking about big cities trains, since they are electrified and have much less rolling resistance they would use much less energy thus Carbon, specially when you take into account most buses are ICE
@@dxkaiyuan4177 You know, I heard that, on 9/11, when all air transport was shut down, it effectively made Amtrak the only form of long-distance transportation. All airlines received heavy subsidies, totaling $15 billion. Amtrak, on the other hand, didn't even get a single penny.
I would want more trains to simply travel. The Japanese lifestyle seems so cool. Maybe it's just rose tinted glasses but being able to bike or take a train to most places seems nice.
I'm from Europe not Japan but trains are brilliant. You don't have to drive everywhere. Kids don't need to rely on parents to get to most places. And it's normally faster and more convenient than driving... I can get to a destination in 3 hours, whilst watching movies or working, compared to 6+ hours driving... Where I cannot be productive at all.
@@p0neh1 just to have the option would be nice but everywhere is built with cars only. Some places have a nice bicycle infrastructure, but stuff is still far. Would be nice to hop on a train to the springs...or home...oh well
Just watched a video of not just bikes about the Swiss railways. They are awesome. Even the smallest towns have their railway stations. And the connectivity between different train routes is very well organised. I live in the Netherlands, and walking plus trains are my favoured way of transportation. And that is not always easy to manage.
@@charlesbrown4483 I know you’re being sarcastic, but the good old milk float lasted for so long precisely because it does have those qualities. maintenance is really low on an electric drive, and local delivery uses predictable routes at fairly slow speeds anyway. Running costs are cheap, so a bunch of them ran for 40 or 50 years with no major rebuilds.
There's two trains here in Australia that have the words "Real trains not road trains" painted on the side of the locomotive. Road trains are trucks with 3 or more trailers on the back.
Those are a bit more efficient than a regular semi-truck, and don't they mostly operate in rural/wilderness regions where the roads are largely unpaved anyway?
@@kysafe Oh, ok, Australia is again the only place that I'm aware of that uses that terminology, here in the states it's doubles/triples, or some variation of that.
@@blaness13 he's asking which state in Australia uses that term "Real trains not road trains", you do know the USA isn't the country in the world with states right?
Amazon is shipping some of their stuff by rail. As part of this Amazon and UPS have partnered with Union Pacific to offer free all you can carry shopping to locals in the LA area who own bolt cutters.
haha yeah cape town (south africa) also has really good legacy rail infrastructure (albeit at a peculiar track width). Like rail access throughout one of the main industrial areas (epping). Anyway no one uses trains because of theft. Like if its not the cargo it’s the overhead copper cables 😭
@@SWAGCOWVIDEO Yeah, the amount of packages that comes through rail contributes to about 50% of the volume on any given day. OP's basically saying that trains would effectively be the perfect middle mile solution. Especially if want to make autonomous vehicles work.
The thing that I dislike about the whole 2 day shipping thing (amazon or otherwise) is I don't even want the thing I ordered that fast! I genuinely don't care... If I need something immediately, I go buy it in person. If I could tick a box that said, "take your time and let the people in the warehouse have a pee break when they are supposed to work on my package. Just get this package to me some time in the next month." I would tick that box every time...
I was like: "my man's about to say trains isn't he". Alan Fisher said trains AND I CLAPPED. Seriously though it's almost shocking just how much better trains are for almost any application
Rule of thumb from my asphalt class: 1 semi = ~10,000 cars. For very low traffic roads, weather can control. But even with minimal truck traffic, they easily make up the majority of road wear.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 They cost us in carbon emissions. What i'm glad about is that the "You don't pay for the roads, so don't ride on them" argument used against cyclists is invalid, since cyclists cause pretty much no damage to the roads.
@@barto22 But they do. Roads used by cyclists still need to be built and maintained. Plus they're stealing valuable lane space from drivers who are paying for them. At least we agree that this is really about le climate change, not improving travel for commuters.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 One cyclist on a road takes up how much of a road compared to one car? This argument is based on the idea: One more bicycle on the road is one less car on the road. By logic, that means more bike traffic equates to less cars, and less cars means better traffic! Of course, how much does it really matter when everyone likes to drive 30 miles just because a car allows them to go the distance quickly? Inefficiency just because we can is such a human trait
@@tylerbird8870 one bike take up less space on the road yes, but need to be passed since it does not drive at car speed. Separate, well maintained bike-lanes, that go to the destination, are much better (like much of the Netherlands have). It also makes it safer for bikers which makes it more likely that someone would take the bike instead of a car.
I can assure yall Alan ain't lying. In India freight costs are dirt cheap and whatever you order off of Amazon you'll get it in around a week. They mostly use railways here (wHICH IS NATIONALIZED but slowly being privatized these days💔) and not only is the shipping cost low, you'll know that your delivery hasn't caused too much emissions + trucks in India are insanely dangerous bc our roads are shit. India is literally train heaven but because of recent privatization drives it has a bleak future. Edit #1: y'all are clowns asf lmao. A week long shipping is actually not a long time, plus it's the default shipping time. Even if you take up one day shipping it'll be shipped through trains. I usually don't take up same day shipping because Amazon delivery workers are worked to death here, and their wages are way too low for them to care about the handling of the product. Edit #2: racists fuck off. Nobody shits on the streets or tracks. Literally nobody. No one asked for your opinion on India's population explosion. Shut the fuck up.
@@redradcomrade from what I have seen so far, the private train business will only be for certain medium to long-distance premium trains, or for premium service on some trains (like what Pullman in the US used to be). I don't think IR intends to privatise most systems.
Another reason the truck loading docks at the Switzerland IKEA are smaller is because in Europe most trucks are actually loaded from the side as opposed to the rear. The trailers have side curtains and a forklift is usually used to load and unload the trailer.
I recently had a package that traveled via one of the "express package trains" run by China Railways. I didn't know they existed before that. They are entirely made up of baggage cars, timetabled as a limited stop express passenger train, and hauled by semi-highspeed electric passenger locomotives. CR seems to have found a way to use its spare capacity as passenger travel shifts more and more towards the high-speed network and locomotive hauled passenger trains are being phased out. The speed is extremely competitive, topping out at 160km/h (or 100mph), and being essentially the highest priority trains in the network means not much can slow them down. These things actually have higher priority than most passenger trains. It took less than a day for my package to travel from Shenzhen to Beijing which would have taken at least 2 most likely 3 days by truck. Currently, they mostly operate between major cities where package volume is high. Not sure if this can be expanded to cover lower volume destinations while retaining their efficiency and speed. But seems like a pretty successful attempt at wining back some express package traffic whist using existing rolling stock.
Man, this is even more depressing. Canada is still stuck in the dark ages. Travel times the same as by car, and certainly no high speed rail for cargo.
@@davidty2006 I actually got to meet with an official from the Swiss Federal Railways and go into the staff only area at the Bern train station, got a small tour and some explanations on how the SBB works plus their future plans.
I am so glad my local state just bought the small local railroad here. Should help with brining regular passenger service back and secure cargo services here.
@@nolibtard6023 OHE, alle Strecken, mit Lüneburg - Bleckede und Lüneburg - Soltau gibt es Pläne für die Aufnahme von Passagierbetrieb. Nach Bleckede gab es sogar schon einen erfolgreichen Testbetrieb.
When you mentioned that the trucks must back into the space to load and unload, I died a bit on the inside. I haven't played Eurotruck Simulator nor have I actually trucked before. I am but a humble truck stop worker that has to do garbage runs. It takes forever for one of those trucks to back into a single spot.
amazon would significantly improve their image in my mind if they just paid for their own freight rail infrastructure between warehouses. Companies are generating more money than nations of the world, they need to start investing back into the systems they affect most
That's the secret though, they're billionaires and they don't care, and the government is worse. I would love if America was fixed but that requires competence
Switching to railroad would undoubtedly be their biggest success if they decided to do that, reducing their future labor costs and gas-guzzling costs by a landslide. Not only that, but it would also encourage other competing companies to adopt railroads as their primary source of nationwide shipping, thus giving railroad more popularity and maybe changing the minds of car-centric Americans, making them less car-centric. I’m telling ya, Amazon NEEDS to do this. Not just for their company but also for their people.
@@ItFoundMe Given how price sensitive Amazon's warehouse and retail operation is, I suspect that they've already ran the numbers on that. Why they didn't adopt it is a different story.
There was just a study released (German) that found that normal visible light has a surprising big effect on the life span of the aspalt. So far nobody has researched it because everyone thought it was mainly the UV rays that do the damage and visible light was ignored. They found out because in the lab their test matter had changed while it was stored for future usage in an UV blocking place.
I presume you refer to the paper 'Daylight causes road damage' published by EurekAlert and carried out by Vienna University Of Technology, Austria (sic.), and I quote from the paper 'The strongest effect actually occurs in the UV range, but the effects of visible light are similarly drastic'. Thankfully, rail lines are not made of asphalt.
@@michaeloreilly657 Sounds like it - I read a newspaper article, not a study ;) It's certainly surprising that nobody tested that in a century of asphalted roads.
The issue of trucks not paying their way on public roads is not unique to the USA. Abolishing this hidden subsidy would go at least some way towards moving freight back to the railways.
@@franksgump5 Yes, they do. But they don't pay an amount that represents the costs they impose. As pointed out in the video, almost all the damage to roads is caused by trucks, so they should pay almost all the cost of repairing roads, and they don't.
@@franksgump5 It is generally accepted that , depending on which research you prefer, the damage done to a road by a vehicle is proportional to the 4th or 5th power of the axle weight. A ten ton truck with two axles has axle weight 10 times the axle weight of 1 ton car. So it is doing between 10,000 and 100,000 times as much damage to the road. It also tends to spend much more time on the road than a car that is not used for commercial purposes.
@@franksgump5 As regards how vehicle taxes are spent, that's a matter for politicians. But the best allocation of resources is achieved when people pay the true cost of those resources. If people had to pay significantly more for goods delivered quickly by truck, they might decide to pay it, or they might decide to use a solution that is more efficient in the use of resources, but takes longer. That would be their choice, but they'd be paying the proper cost of their decision, not be subsidised by other people.
@@franksgump5 let's be honest, the government is the one who destroyed the railroad companies in the 50's to 70's, it wasn't really trucks and cars that did, it's actually the government that did, because they made them pay higher taxes of the companies which made them bankrupt etc, but in the 80's they lower the taxes.
I think yours is among the best urbanist/transit oriented channels on RUclips. In addition to informational, you're very engaging and speak with charisma, something many other urbanist channels could learn from (not hating on them). Great work.
"Is the answer always trains?" Well I know one thing for sure, the answer is certainly trains a hell of a lot more often than we use trains as the solution.
Well, it doesn't have to be traditional rail either. Cargo trams have been proposed, and could half traffic in the inner city where traditional rail won't easily get there. And I suppose "cargo metros" would also work to some extent. These are just trains in a different form.
@@wta1518 They are trains, but different. Speed and accessibility are a tradeoff. A vehicle that goes just below the speed of sound can't stop by your house specifically.
MAnnnnnnN trains aRE so cool, those big powerful engines, the ability to pull ToNs of weight, and the fact they are just awesome. In australia trains are seen as job stealing and old school, it kinda sucks. Thanks for the super cool video my dude. (:
Have you seen the razor train at 8:49, how is it even possible to make something that is literally two rectangles stacked on top of each other plus some protrusions exceedingly aesthetic looking.
Other than all the benefits you've already listed here, I'd like to add just one more benefit to using trains for warehousing: Trains are far cooler than trucks. Trains 1, Trucks 0
I was delighted to see the mega swing intermodal car at 10:31 with the DB Schenker logo. I work for this company and our goal is to provide innovative solutions in logistics.
The real issue is that we don't pay the environmental costs associated with shipping. If we did, then suddenly less "right now shipping" would be much more acceptable for everyone. We are just pushing it away. It is the same thing with global shipping, we are not paying the price for burning all the fuel that it does, we are just pushing it to the planet.
I agree trucking destroys highways more than smaller vehicles at an exponential rate, but I don't believe this problem to be uniquely Amazon. Most if not all big box retailers use just in time logistics.
That’s the thing though. Aren’t just in time delivery logistics better suited for trucks? It’s not impossible to use boxcars for that but like 95 percent of warehouses in America don’t seem to bother. For long haul stuff it seems companies like Amazon would rather stick their containers and trailers on an intermodal train if they need to go long distance. That’s better, but it still creates issues.
Switzerland is an nearly solitary exception rather than the rule when it comes to the handling of freight by nationalized carriers, especially when it comes to small customers. Nationalized railways in Europe (when not operating in a planned economy) have an abysmal record when it comes to freight and its only with recent open access reforms that the situation has somewhat improved. In Germany DB did their own version of PSR called MORA-C in the 1990s where they set minimum traffic requirements for customers. If these were not met they would pull the switch. Many customers who wanted service had to involuntarily switch to trucks after these reforms. The situation is even worse in further western countries like France and Spain where freight is on many lines simply nonexistent and modal share of rail freight negligible. The Swiss rail freight system is amazing but exists through heavy regulation and equally heavy subsidies. The Swiss railways are indeed a model but one thats hard to replicate due to many factors, a big one being the direct democracy system. For freight rail the US still does a far better job than most of the world, despite the best efforts of the Class 1s. The shortline railroads do a much better job serving smaller customers than either a Class 1 or a nationalized carrier would. Similar such operations are starting to appear in Germany and elsewhere in Europe too, operating under open access framework. It does bear mentioning that the one nationalized US carrier abandoned 1000s of miles of trackage and left many towns and customers without rail service.
This is all a fair set of points. I think Alan has a great mindset about refocusing the US on rail, but simply pointing at another country and saying we should replicate their model is a little naive (though I’ll give him credit it gets the conversation started). We absolutely should be taking ideas and solutions from other countries who do things better, but we can’t just copy paste, we need to make sure those solutions are tweaked and toned to work properly here in the US.
Switzerland does not subsidies cargo freight. There are Talks now, to do so. The Issue with DB is, they also own a trucking company. What they do is, get the money from the government for rail maintenance and use it to finance their trucking business. That way they are being financed twice by the government, as the road they used are also payed with tax money.
At the very least, having a national infrastructure entity for rail like the UK would be a huge benefit. Private rail companies, especially the Class Is don't invest in very basic things. There's a reason why there's an epidemic of derailments and crashes in the US. They don't invest in maintaining the rail, they don't invest in maintaining the equipment, they don't invest in barriers and grade separation, and most importantly, they don't invest in their workers. Leaving them to maintain a network is insane... and the statistics show how badly they do. If you can't buy them out completely, would make a lot of sense to buy the rails and have operators pay to use them, financing the improvements and upkeep.
I mentioned using rail freight more for more varied types of delivery on a CNBC video comment about the supply chain shortages in America and the main complaint was from previous customers of railways there, complaining about how awful those companies had been with tracking/losing their shipments. If only the freight railways in the US were not owned by the worst companies... Because the majority of comments were positive and said we need more rail delivery. I'm ignoring the one where I was called a Commi 😂.
This problem is perhaps not unique to USA, in Czechia there were some cases, not long ago, where cargo had traveled hundreds of kilometres despite station of origin and destination were mere 20 km apart and it took over week to deliver it.
You were called a commie for wanting more rail delivery services? I can understand being called a commie for nationalization. (I personally don't agree with a complete nationalized railroad network) but damn thats Harsh.
@@bonda_racing3579 Id sat the biggest problem with nation RRs in the US is your trading 80s business men for career criminal who business model operates at less than 1% efficiency.
In France they talked about trains replacing trucks for decades! As France is a massive transit country. The motorways are choker blocked with trucks. But nothing has been done. Just political promises a few decades ago.
Meanwhile 1 way Singapore could reduce road truck traffic is when it replaces its 4 container ports with the Tuas MegaPort, which'd eliminate the need to transport containers between different ports if they're to be transshipped thru the country from 1 ship to another that've each docked @ different ports
Nothing has been done because promises to remove trucks don't pan out in reality. Trucks backing up motorways is caused by setting up transit hubs outside of cities, we want less trucks on urban roads. Shifting longhaul freight to trains cannot solve this problem because trains do not deliver to end users, no matter what you end back at trucks on the road. Now either you set up rail hubs outside of cities like we do with truck freight which wont remove trucks from our highways. or you place them in cities and unto 70 years of progress on reducing congestion and pollution from trucks in cities. Rolling stock fan's will never be convinced rail isn't always the answer and so it's an easy win for politicians, Most people know the promise is total bollocks so they ignore it and those swayed by it will be swayed by the next rail promise and the next one and next one, so there's no need to make good on the promise.
I agree we need to move back to rail. I really hate all the short lines that have been converted to walking trails. However, nationalizing the railroads won't solve anything. What we need to do is find creative ways to make rail more attractive and profitable for shippers. Either way we as consumers are footing the bill.
@@wesleymccoy870 Rémi's point is that double stacking is often used as an argument against electrification when the footage showed double stacking with electrification.
Quick correction: from what I could learn, neither the network nor the railway operators are 100% nationalized. The ownership structures between different railways operators can vary wildly. However, where the Swiss Federal Railways operate, they mostly run on their own tracks, and some regional and private operators have their own bits of tracks too. In general though, the ownership follows this kind of pattern: first you have the confederation (Swiss gov.) and the local cantons or groupings of cantons who own the majority stake, and only after that come the share of corporate and individual investors. My guess is that, this way you can accept private investment while still making sure the public bodies are the ones making plans and making decisions, which I think is a mentality that feels mainstream enough that it could work in other parts of the world too. And even with this funding splitting going on, the Swiss state invests about 7-8 times as much in the rail network per capita than even countries like Germany and France. In the end, what makes the Swiss rail be so reliable and on-time is not some magic (and overly patriotic) imagination of "swissness", but instead an adequate amount of funding, and well planned out processes and structures of the organizations themselves that make maintenance and operation as efficient as they are. This is something we can learn from, no matter where we are.
Another thing i heard about Switzerland is that they do not need the ok from the European Union and has freedom to decide and fund what they want to . Switzerland limits how many trucks can enter at the boarder every 24 hours but always supplies the option of freight rail service at a cost of course . Austria and Germany wanted to force large amounts of freight onto the rails much in the same way as Switzerland mostly due to wear and tare on highways by trucks , but the EU vetoed most of it .
@Ih, Ey! Ya i know it sounds like that , i realised that but Switzerland doesn't hafta worry about "discriminating" other EU countrys ( nor does Norway ) . But this should be understood for those that think they will just copy Switzerland in railway policies . Germany is dragging their heals building out railway upgrades in part because they are restricted in charging transit trucks for the real cost of Autobahn infrastructure . I meant truck tollls at the boarders . Switzerland has truck restictions at the boarders . Switzerland litteraly has a maximum truck counter at the boarder well bellow the max freight , over an above that number and the rest needs to go by train or wait . EU countrys are NOT allowed to do this .
@@lassepeterson2740 @Ih, Ey! (how does one tag multiple people on youtube help, this used to be a lot easier) Yeah, and how things are going with the coalition agreement in Germany cars and trucks will pretty much still get a free pass on everything infrastructure related. The new transport minister is from the libertarian FDP party and said he will be the "advocate of the car drivers" and pretty much continue to uphold the status quo. No tolls nor speed limits in sight for us. Just pain.
As someone who has been living in switzerland for 11 years, amazon doesn't exist here. Mabye its for the best because we go buy our stuff at local town shops. I've also heard that its the first country that has 100% of its rail infrastructure electrified and i can say that ive never been on a diesel train in switzerland even in the most remote mountain village. I love my country so much honestly.
That is no surprise when coal was expensive, yet water abundant, who in their right mind would burn something imported when, since late 19th century you can just spin generators for free and run trains virtually for free? In other countries it was like, they had a coal, that was cheap, but not enough water resources, so it made no sense to burn coal in power plants, then produce electricity and then use it for running trains, as they would have to not only pay for coal, but for all the maintenance and construction of overhead wires and they would need power plant like every 10-15 miles or so with systems that were available back then.
In Korea, we have one day shipping on alot of products, and the roads here don't look nearly that bad. It's largely the result of sprawl and lack of suburban tax revenue for suburban roads imo
Korea has on average much younger roads than the U.S. Give it 50 years or so and it will likely look different. Of course, sprawls etc plays into that as well as other factors, such as that Korea has much less heavy freight traffic over all.
I love when a trucker tells a railroader: "iD lIke tO sEe a tRaIn dElIvEr pRoDuCtS tO tHe dOor" Um, yeah, it's called "spotting cars", the fuck do you think an industry spur is? a boxcar - or FOUR truckloads - can be spotted right up to a building with ease. RR's have been doing it for literally more than a century.
you literally didn't give an answer to the statement lol. trains cant deliver to your house or to majority or stores. you just look so stupid right now; Trucks will ALWAYS be needed but definitely could be less relied on for long distance only.
And yet you mofos wonder why there is a suppy chain issue. All it takes is for my fellow truckers to stop for a week and you would starve. You are the most ungrateful mofos on the planet. I swear that people like you have had life easy. If you have no compassion for any person way of living, how do you expect anyone to care? Oh do it for the planet. That will fall on deff ears. Change you're god damn attitude if you want people to care. Fuckin entitle twat.
To Michlo3 : I've looked around online for "spotting cars". Couldn't find any references to what you were describing. Would you have a link or a different name for it?
Very few truckers actually deliver to your door, they generally deliver to hubs that distribute the packages to smaller delivery vehicles, which is pretty similar to how a railroad would have to deliver goods.
@@Urhoboman5 That's what we call it, or local industry switching perhaps. You don't possibly think I'm making this up now, do you? I lack such an imagination.
Local freight is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Unless nationalization takes over and mandates come in local freight is gonna be a rare oddity. I worked for at NS in Louisville, KY and the amount of local freight had diminished almost entirely. There’s unused tracks everywhere and yards are getting torn up left and right. Word of mouth before I left was that they were talking about shutting down the terminal in Louisville completely in favor of focusing on thru freight. Which even then takes 12 hours to travel what would take 2-1/2 in a truck. Our rail infrastructure is so dated. A lot of it is single track territory and not to mention having to run PTC is a nightmare. Got called to recrew a train whose second engine went out and couldn’t make it over the hill which in turn blocked the single main line. Long story short, it took us 9 hours to travel 10 miles light engine to fetch that train. Trains had backed up at almost every siding in my division. The thing is a few of them were train ID’s from 3-5 days ago. Seeing firsthand how inefficient and chaotic the rail system is, I doubt we’ll switch back to rail anytime soon.
City buses are also quite heavy and put a lot of wear on road surfaces. The difference is that mass transit is actually economically productive. Of course trains would be even better.
Look no further than Tokyo for proof that subways and trains are all you need in 90% of areas IF they are actually done correctly. Buses and such make up that 10% of harder to reach areas. Not only is it the best public transport in the world, it is also very profitable.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 not sure about massively economic but for public transit to become profitable it needs more people to use it. One area that is never talked about is how do we make people use public transit more often because realistically no government can go from shit transit to Tokyo overnight and start restricting road space for private vehicles.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 Lots of things require public investment to produce a financial return: basic scientific research is probably the best example. Economically productive does not mean profitable for shareholders in the short term.
Well, ever since "big Oil", GM, and other truck, bus and automotive special interest groups got their foothold on the U.S. government scheme of things, both passenger and freight railroading took a nosedive. Railroads were pretty much on their own as they received no subsidies in comparison to automotive road and interstate construction. That's why railways in Europe and Asia, while although looked down upon by some in the USA, will ALWAYS be light years ahead of U.S. railroading. People here are interested in one form of "climate". It's the one that fulfills the greed of the powerful special interest groups no matter the damage done to the environment or to the people who choke in it. Just sayin'. But your video was definitely spot on.
Climate science is manipulated by those same interests. It's deeper than greed. It's power and control. Look up Steven E Koonin (recently on JRE)... Amazon, governments, banks, all corrupted by the same force. Once we get them out (psychopaths) we will not have to worry about this any more. As long as we keep aware that psychopaths exist and will do terrible things to us.
No. This is a common myth. Railroads were greatly subsidized. Passenger trains only made money because the postal service used them to move mail, railroads were given land to build their railroads for practically free, and the government imported a lot of immigrants to keep wages down for labor. Obvious GM wanted to sell cars, but they didn’t need a secret anti-train conspiracy. People would much rather travel in a personal automobile than a train in most circumstances.
A similar experience in my country, the trucking union got so much power that the ring leader would literally put the whole country to a halt if the local politicians are doing something he doesn't like. And he doesn't like trains.
As someone who moved from America to central Europe: 2 day shipping is overrated. If I really need something that quickly, I'll just go get it myself (on public transit, no less). Waiting a few days or even one or two weeks isn't all that bad. And it means that sometimes I'll have two or three packages in limbo and then I'll get one and it's kind of like an exciting surprise to guess what arrived in the mail. Also Swiss rail is amazing, I'm glad I've had the pleasure of riding it. Cheaper than a plane ticket, faster than a bus, serves just as many locations as regional busses, and ALWAYS on time. Plus it is wayyyy more comfortable than even a car. Makes German rail look like shit, and that too is pretty good.
I don't know about other people but as long as I can get it in less than a week, 2 day shipping is excessively fast. I know why Amazon did that, and that's because at the time online shopping had horrendous shipping times unless you paid equally excessive pricing for express shipping, but really what we need isn't 2 day shipping most of the time but 2-4 day shipping, where it'll come either very quickly or acceptably quickly but either way you can still reasonably expect when something will arrive and it feels relatively quick
I have never understood this two day delivery mania with their own cars and so. I always order packages to be delivered either on post office or to one of shops that is partner of other company and then pick them when I have time. Sometime it is delivered nex day, sometimes after three days or so.
That’s why there’s a pretty big divide in languages: if you speak German, odds are German rail is seen as shit, any other language, German rail is probably seen as great
@@genoobtlp4424 I don't know, in Czechia it seems like German railways are considered average at best, but Austrian and Swiss railways are considered great and models to follow. Maybe it is due to exposure to DB. And as well opinion on Germany is turning worse, but we never had this wave of obsession with "cool" Germany that seems to sweeping the world in last decade or so. But perhaps history and bit of nostalgia plays some role as well. Anyhow for me, personally, Germany is this strange cold dark place that you don't really want to visit. Country that is insincere and which can't be trusted.
I work for UPS at the New Jersey Automatic Hub. The fact we didn't work to install rail lines when we have one running behind the other warehouses when we mostly haul irgegulars will baffle me
After looking further into my Union contract with UPS they end up paying more due to the contract for rail than they would trains. Meaning the only reason was to protect trucking jobs we can't fill for because UPS is overly controlling of it's driving staff
I spend a lot of time on google maps tracking rail that I drive over every day and never see traffic. There are TONS of warehouses all throughout the city, many abandoned (yes I check property records too), with access to that unused rail. If I had more capital, or a better plan, there is a massive opportunity there.
It starts to get mind-boggling how much safer and more efficient it could be if we think about the implications of more rail usage for shipping. Like, consider a 100-car freight train travelling at night. It needs perhaps 2-4 people to keep it going, but 'staying awake at the wheel' isn't nearly as serious of a threat as 100 semi-truck drivers on a freeway would have to do. Trains are dedicated lines, no sharing with other kinds of traffic. Very efficient because of the steel on steel connection. While it might be a bit more active with wildlife at night, generally very quiet in terms of human activity outside and wildlife can be protected in high traffic areas with fences and bridges and stuff. But night freight trains are used in some areas, but could be heavily increased in regularity and span if there was the will.
@@coolioso808 The only thing I don't like about it would be putting 100 well paying jobs out of order. Things would *maybe* be cheaper is rail was used, but it makes me sad to think all the big riggers would be out of work. Overall though, you are totally right. Less wear and tear on our roads, safer, the positives far outweigh the potential negatives
@@TheGhostHAG Yeah, the overall positives are there, but of course the people who would be out of work is an issue. Now, if there really was a big cross-country or inter-continental railway improvement project being done, it would require a lot of hands on deck. I'm not saying the skills of truckers are exactly transferable, but I do think there could be a lot of related work on the railways. Even if less conductors are needed for each train, more trains would be needed overall if the network was expanded. Then, of course, more rail-line workers to maintain and improve the system would be necessary. Some people are against it, but the need for logical transformation of society could be aided by a UBI being implemented. People think that it's giving 'the government' too much control, but the idea is that it's UNconditional income or a dividend for our collective contributions to society and technological advancement, we all get a certain amount and that frees us from dependency on certain jobs or industries for livelihood. We are going to need a different system, I think, overall. Because the one we have isn't working for most people. Don't get me wrong, most people are working, but the fruits of our labor isn't fair, equitable or sustainable in the way that it could be or should be.
@@coolioso808 Lost me with the second paragraph. Economics matter, and a UBI just people everyone getting it back at zero. Prices will rise dramatically. Taxation will rise dramatically. This can be achieved without government. Otherwise spot on
@@TheGhostHAG If we want to see an improvement in the efficiency, safety and sustainability of society from production to distribution of goods and services we should also expect to see an evolution in our socio-economic system and how it functions. We can't expect the current system to stay basically the same and then still work well. We need a systemic revolution to go with any hopes of a sustainable, efficient, healthy society. Don't you think? I don't view UBI as an endgame, but rather a transition possibility towards a more sustainable system. If you have any idea how we could create a more sustainable, efficient, healthy system without the ongoing problem increases such as poverty, crime, war and environmental degradation, then I would like to hear it.
You know it's funny I work in one of those Amazon warehouses and we were actually raising this very question in a conversation recently, "How and why does Amazon not have its own dedicated rail lines?"
All class 1s aren’t gonna sell to Amazon. And all the land is already owned by most rail lines. It’s near impossible to build a railroad unless they literally buy out a railroad.
I live in Brazil, approximately 65% of our cargo is transported by trucks. And as a train person I really do hope the investments in rails increase -_-
My father was a truck driver whose career, interrupted by WWII, spanned from 1939 to 1985. He always said the transcontinental trucking industry wouldn't have existed if the railroads had done their job.
As small as the UK is it is suffering from the same problems. I live in the small regional town of Hinckley. Before the 1960s major freight in and out went through the freight yard. The infamous Beecham report has done away with all this and freight was put on the roads. The result is highways congested with heavy vehicles digging up the roads. The plan now is to build a new rail freight yard in the pristine countryside. I lived most of my life in Australia and they have done the same thing. What used to travel by rail now travels by road.
As someone who works in logistics and tried to use trains ( and why it failed for us repeatedly ) 1- building the train is extremely time communing and breaking it up is just as bad so if the whole train is not going the same place this is going to get time consuming and expensive ( I live in a city of 230 000 ) 2- trains can not easily pas each other so basically the entire train has to go the same place or sequentially to the same places 3- a train of less than 20 cars is a money loser for the railway and they will not do it ( we tried many times ) 4- getting the right of way for a rail siding in an already developed area was going to take millions of dollars and take decades ( and the city planer was not optimistic on it ever happening ) 5- the railway will not give a grantee on delivery time of less then 2 weeks ( I mean something enforceable with damages in court , not just saying "yes we will try" ) It costs us money when shipments are late by the day and that cost compounds ! 6- the rail system is optimized for bulk goods ( think lumber , oil , sulfer , scrap iron , pig iron , grain , ore ,coal and bulk chemicals ) not huge numbers of individual items like your bike lock . If they are going to ship bike locks they want an entire container of them all going the same place preferably 20 sea containers . They will charge extra for each stop the train will make and the tiem it will spend at your loading dock
You addressed something that the video hasn't: unloading time and manpower efficiency. Yes, trains are more fuel and unloading land efficient. But if you've ever worked in/with warehouses, you'd know that how fast it takes to load/unload cargo, and how many workers you need for the job is a much, much more pressing consideration for warehouses than land use. Especially in places where land is cheap, like the USA.
@@beardedbarnstormer9577 there was Switzerland as example. I only watched this video idk about any other aspects but it showed warehouse with rail line and explanation of the government pushing for rail lines to warehouses. I'd assume it at least works if they are using it
jamaica has systematically worked to eliminate its rail network, at one point in history Jamaica boasted claims such as having the best rail system in the western hemisphere and now highways are the way that they chose for the direction of the country instead of high speed rail connections for freight and passengers, it is a sad day for rail here
I've been to Jamaica and had a guide with me and about 8 others in this old van driving around the island, up and down the hilly single-lane roads. It was not exactly relaxing and not smooth at all. That same trip, we went all around the island, if we just had smooth high speed rail to each of the main destinations and then could coordinate a taxi or something for the shorter distances within towns then we would have. It would have been so much nicer and safer. I still loved experiencing Jamaica. Beautiful island and people. Just wish the best for each land to be built better.
They’d rather put those signs up than admit most people inherently don’t have the attributes needed to consistently drive safely and develop a rail centric transportation system.
All aboard the cargo train express!!! Great work as usual Alan. The one thing I wonder.. if those other warehouses are right near a train line, how the hell haven't they thought to call up the rail company all the other warehouses right down the road use and ask for a contract???
Because in order to ensure that goods arrive perfectly on time, Amazon has to purchase a section of track to give their trains absolute priority (which they won't do as doing such would be less attractive than trucks). See Ford's attempt to provide coal to his factory being stopped as he couldn't buy out the local railway.
Japan on passenger rail: (Swole Doge) I am responsible for 72.7 percent of passenger-kilometers of travel Japan on freight rail: (cheems) Oh no, highways! Now I onlybring 5% of freight
Complicated. They have a shit ton of ship cargo just for transporting goods inside the country. Lots of goods are transported from port to port. They could use more light freight trains though and I agree
Highway thickness is no accident. Another blatant case of planned obsolescence, lobbied and paid for a long time ago by [shocker] the biggest winners in every industry involved. I get so pissed every time my drive through town in the summer. That's when they shut down 3/5 lanes to replace arbitrary sections of our main artery.
I found it very distracting. If i were driving there i wouldn't pay attention to the other cars, because there's a HUGE FLASHING SIGN so it must be something extremely urgent and important, and i need to know what it says ASAP (not exactly rational, but it's how the human mind works). Then i realize it says "distracted driving kills", then i think "Oh, distracted? Ironic, since i'm distracted right now."
Switzerland’s rail network is 100% electrified, except shipyards. Private and Sate-owned railway companies work under the same timetable conference. About 60 % of the network is nationalized since exactly 100 years.
To back up your point about class I railroads: Amazon wanted to pay Norfolk Southern to have their own dedicated intermodal train a year or two back and they pretty much told them to kick rocks
This is a very sound argument, i like trains :3 however, there will be many other challenges to do the switch. I live in a small town and the region is growing. There are going to be two new amazon warehouses being built and the county is excited for new and accessible jobs. Yet, I am not looking forward to the new traffic these trucks will make on the way to work in the big city >w< We have trains here but they only transport coal and other mined or energy products. Everytime i look at those trains I think... you can do more :')
“I do NOT want to take away your 2 day shipping.” That’s the problem; you should want to. If you want that item so quickly, go to a store and buy it instead of putting this much stress on the supply chain system.
In a lot of countries the post office was run by (or at least associated with) the railways, and mail trains were common as they greatly decreased the time letters and parcels could be delivered. Sad that postage, along with freight, has been moved off trains to trucks
I live in Ontario, a province that has seen probably 90% of it's track infrastructure torn up and built over. It's sad seeing all the small towns that once had many rail lines now having none. Just ghosts of what's left.
I heard from IRM that shipping vegetables by rail in the USA have made a slight comeback, specifically with potatoes! Due to the high weight of potatoes that trains can carry more of them in larger loads, and it helps that potatoes aren't highly time sensitive product.
"Let's say you live in Philadelphia, PA, and you order a new bike lock off of Amazon." From this point on I assumed that we were talking about Justin Roczniak.
I'm not going to DuckDuckGo that. But I assume you mean the crazy Berkley teacher who cracked someone over the head with one while he was LARPing as a protester
@@gxlorp Nah, I'm referring to one of the hosts of the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. He lives in Philly, talks frequently about biking, and he and Alan move in the same circles, so they almost certainly know each other.
A fun fact is that Switzerland was the first country to use wide-spread electrification of railroads because it is way more reliable and less maintenance heavy than steam and diesel trains, especially on mountainous terrain
No Switzerland head a lot of electricity from hydroelectric power station and no domestic coal and oil. The another think is, Switzerland small and dense.
Honestly if anything about Amazon needs to change it's their return policy. While it's nice as a customer to benefit from their nearly no questions asked return policy. The fact they basically just throw it all away is a massive waste. There is no second hand market, no refurbishment. Even nearly untouched boxes get chucked into the a landfill because they don't want to spend the effort to look through it and check. Also Amazon refused to donate any of it, because again they don't want to sort through it or have anything to do with it. Even a small warehouse my friend worked at threw away a good couple hundred pounds of stuff away a day. Stuff the management wouldn't even let them take home for fear of leading to theft of non returned items.
Here in brazil we are having the same problem, the bureaucracy is just too big(in fact we are one of the worst countrines to make business in the world) is impossible to build new railroads because only the governament can do, but, the governament also cant operate this railroads since only private companies can do that, so the politicians never do anything since they think they will not have profit from that, the truck problem here is so terrible that is common to see capsized trucks in the middle of the streets, a funny thing is that bureaucracy here is so big that the governament put new taxes in trucks, so we have less trucks now, but, they also but new taxes in trains, and they also prohibit small trucks(kei trucks) and bigger trains, literally a hell of logistics.
This is where I disagree with the premise that nationalized rail lines automatically mean progress. Mexico for example privatized their rail lines and investment and traffic on their railroads have increased greatly since (with the backdrop of NAFTA being created).
the answer is always trains, I assure you.
Acela postál when?
Trains and containers.
The best inventions to ever exist.
or bikes , sometimes they work better than trains , sometimes
Amazon is already using rail. I saw Amazon trailers riding on railway flat cars.
Always
•Build your economy on roads
•Don't maintain them
I’m pretty sure rails can actually handle being jnmaintained a lot better then roads can as well (just so long as they don’t end up like how Penn centrals network did)
The U.S. built its economy (and its superpower status) because it has more miles of interconnected navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined-free infrastructure that doesn’t ever need to be maintained and is more efficient than even rail
@@evboto.5597 more river and canal transport would be interesting. But you'd still need road or rail at some points. The rivers and canals didn't go everywhere
@@evboto.5597 Since over 40% of cargo is transported over truck (based on ton-miles), and less than 8% on water, i would have to disagree.
@@Mecrom The reason why we use trucks for so many things now is because a.) Jones Act (the dumbest law the U.S. has ever enacted) b.) our goods are more high value-added so what method of transport is used dosent matter as much as it used to, and c.) the extreme aging and disrepair of the waterway infrastructure. Replacing ALL the U.S.’s waterway infrastructure will cost less than $300 billion and if Jones Act is repealed a lot more goods will use our waterways even with the extreme aging of our infrastructure
Spotted a small mistake. You said Switzerland has most of their mainlines electrified.
Actually Switzerland is the only country with 100% electrification.
Yep the only unlectrified parts are industrial access rails
Taiwan/ROC also now has most of its mainlines electrified (after the one along its rural east coast was a few years back) though I also imagine that it helps that its' network doesn't have much branching, which could simplify the planning & projects needed
Diesel trains are crappy in Mountainous terrain
@@hamanakohamaneko7028 Not really
Yes because using hydroelectricly powered trains reduce the dependency of us to our shit neighbours. We absolutely realized this during the Great War and its hardships imposed onto the swiss people. It holds true even today. Maybe even more so now that they are "unified" in one obnoxious blob of toxicity. Its almost as bad as 1940-45. At least back then there were some countries fighting them.
I'm a trucker, and I absolutely LOVE my job. I want to do this until the day I retire (in 50-ish years). Yet, I absolutely agree with everything you say. We should absolutely move more stuff by trains than by trucks. The amount of trucks on the roads doing long-hauls instead of trains doing them are mind-boggeling.
No real trucker would say this.
@@rust8infinite I'm concerned about the future and the climate impact all of these trucks have. I'm in my mid 20s, and have a lot ahead of me. Besides, it isn't feasible to have the train go everywhere.
My job is to pick up a container by the train depot, and drive around delivering to the local grocery stores.
@@hatsjer dont be concerned about “climate impact”
I’m older then you and they’ve been claiming this nonsense the whole time. There is not going to be a “catastrophe” or an “apocalypse”
At most there will have to be adaptations like constructing more aquifers and sea walls
@@eriknervik9003 To say nothing of all the species, plant, animal, and fungi that are being catastrophically impacted by, not just heat and water level stresses, but the pollutants in their circulatory systems from among other things, exhaust gasses, runoff from roads, extraction, and tailings fields. Of the huge swaths of habitat destroyed by parking lots and inefficient buildings, never mind the other effects both of those things have on their surrounding environments.
Stop trying so much harder to find excuses than in finding the true context for all of the impacts of industrialization and population growth; oh, and growing energy demands per capita as industrialization progresses.
@@weatheranddarkness
While we shouldn’t be careless as to such things, soecies go extinct all the time and there is no moral obligation to prevent the extinction of any one species. Humans take priority.
Another advantage of trains: more capacity per employee, and eventual end-to-end automation is way easier than self-driving trucks will be.
@Gustav there still will be a large amount of regional truck traffic especially inland. But the long coast to coast journeys that are currently performed by trucks needs to be cut out
@Gustav It is not a problem. As a country matures, every country eventually enters a phase of population reduction. Japan, china, korea, all have them. US is an exception because of influx of people. Automation becomes a necessity.
@Gustav Depends on the country, here in the uk we have to source a lot of our drivers from abroad, as we simply don't have enough truck drivers in the uk alone.
@@guicho271828 "It is not a problem"... as long as you're not a truck driver, or someone working one of the many other occupations that the trucking industry creates. Just reduce the population of those undesirables, right comrade? You're fucking sick.
@Gustav which is why you need safety nets and government services that help you get a free education so you can join the workforce again
I love using Switzerland as a comparison to the US when talking about rail transport, because it has a similar population as New Jersey, while having twice the land area. It points to how density isn't the only thing holding back public transit in the US.
Not to mention that Switzerland hasn't an especially train-friendly geography. If they can do it...
@@steemlenn8797 Hill go choo choo
Switzerland has a great train network, but trucks are still heavily used. Post offices are mainly serviced by trucks, and a lot of international mail is trucked in. Passenger rail has the priority, and rail is not always the cheapest option.
Switzerland has however made a plan (which has been approved) to reduce trucks by building an underground autonomous transportation system just for frieght.
www.cst.ch/en/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_Sous_Terrain
ruclips.net/video/htTo-_5X8gA/видео.html
@@catlover9998 Small ones, obviously but the Sorting Building have Train connections
Amtrack 30000 yearly passengers
ÖBB 43000 yearly intercity passengers.
Population:
America 329 million
Austria 8 million
I am a Swiss car driver. I have always taken our cargo system for granted. But when I drive abroad (Germany, Italy etc.). I notice how many cargo trucks are around. I hate it. They turn a 3 lane highway into a 2 lane one. Because they occupy the right lane all the time. When one cargo truck overtakes another, we have a single lane highway. On a 2 lane highway, we have a rolling roadblock. Then I realize how grateful I am that our cargo train system is so good. I rarely see a cargo truck on Swiss roads.
I remember the highway nightmare from when I went to Europe (outside of Switzerland at least). You had a right lane jammed full of trucks going 80 kph making it difficult to merge onto the highway to begin with, then you had to wait for a big enough gap where you could safely merge into the rest of the traffic, often going at least 130 kph. Then you got to do it all in reverse once you were ready to get off the highway.
I live near a large city which has a mostly 2 lane interstate heading to another large city in the us. It is a major shipping route where I would bet 80% of the traffic on the interstate is trucks. They are now increasing over 10 miles of the interstate to 3 lanes because of the traffic, when they could have just made the left lane trucks only and solved the problem entirely. Just a couple weeks ago a man was crushed between two semis which transferred all trucks to the two parallel roads in the town in which I live (which happens anytime there is a wreck. It basically makes it impossible to go anywhere at all, and sometimes they often consider cutting schools short to allow the buses extra time. The irony: We have a direct train line partially grade separated running parallel to the interstate, with a speed limit of 80, cutting 1/4 of travel time in the best of times for the interstate, despite that we have only about 6 trains a day come through. Physically and time-wise there is no reason why the trains should run more. It is simply the subsidization of highways and efficiency of loading freight to trains.
Meanwhile Singapore ended rail freight/cargo in 2011 as it was run using tracks owned & operated by neighbouring Malaysia's nat'l operator KTM, having been built when both countries were British Crown Colonies (but then Singapore got expelled from Malaysia in 1965), so Singapore complained that was impinging its sovereignty. Which probably came back to bite it during the pandemic as the gov't required truckers from Malaysia into Singapore to be tested at the border crossings, & they'd have to wait there too for the test results, leading to jams that also involved 3500 chickens dying in the back of a lorry (due to heatstroke as they weren't given water, since the lorry's company hadn't expected the journey to take so long). The no. of drivers needed & thus the testing needed could've been reduced if the cargo was transported by rail instead (with perhaps a new cargo-handling terminal built near the border, to address sovereignty concerns). Eventually the government had to give truckers priority for vaccination too to prevent our supply chains from being paralyzed
A lot of trucks that need to go from Italy to Germany, they don't go through Switzerland, they go through Austria or France, due to the price of the toll roads. This is why you don't see a lot of trucks in Switzerland.
You would enjoy Brazil, we ship 61% of cargo by road
We are noticing this here in Australia too. Many rail lines have been shut down (mainly in rural areas) forcing hundreds if not thousands more trucks onto roads that were already terrible. If that isn't bad enough, the government basically refuses to fix them and the local councils don't have enough money to do it themselves. Bring back the trains
And Australia operates some world record level train lines. Why did the world just forgot that trains are awesome
I work at a warehouse. We are LITERALLY right next to a train track, but our warehouse wasn’t built with a railroad. Knowing that this is even an option now really makes me mad
“Wait the solution is just… Trains?”
*aims pistol*
“Always has been”
*BLAM*
Truth is kid, the answer was trains from the start.
(Shoots a train from a rail hub at astronaut)
When I understood the weakness of concrete... it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. Aspired for the purity of the blessed machine. For the machine is very energy efficient.
@@Dheeidjdndbd I am not Russian. I am Kazak from Kazakhstan.
@@Dheeidjdndbd No worries. It's a reference to a mechanicus speech from warhammer 40k.
It‘s crazy to think that in Switzerland in the 1930s 70% of its rail network was already electrified
Probably because they already had hydropower plants even before the 1900s.
It helps that Switzerland is only 15k square miles and almost entirely land without large bodies of water and has a high population density. For reference 41/50 states in the US are larger than the entire country of Switzerland. 40/50 are more than double its size, and 31/50 are more than triple its size. The biggest state in the union (Alaska) is 38 times the size of Switzerland
Its not so crazy, if you think of the source of electricity. Bavaria also ran a lot Electric trains, cause they could get cheap electricity by water power.
@@ColorHawk_ the U.S. also doesn’t have that good of an infrastructure system in any part of the U.S….anywhere.
Regardless of area.
France tooo
i worked for fedex express for about a year, I was amazed at the inefficiencies that were common place to facilitate our priority overnight packages. our routes were practily run twice, just to get priority pakages done first.
Work at FedEx corporate Canada. Overnight express is a marvel. They need to do anything in there power to make sure it gets delivered or they lose money on the shipment. Having your package go from Toronto to Vancouver within a single day is mind blowing.
It makes sense to me that the priority packages would be inefficient logistically, since the customer has to pay a large premium for the delivery to be so fast. Assumedly the customer is in a dire need for the product in that instance, and that need outweighs the downside of inefficient delivery.
Former USPS employee here. That was pretty much the same thing with our Priority Mail Express packages. Like, pretty much everyone pays attention when that ding goes off on the overhead package scanner in the office, more often than not one of the carriers would be assigned to run _all_ of the express packages while the main carrier focused on the everything-else, you had to sign out every express you took, and you would get in BIG trouble if it was late (since missing the deadline by even a minute auto-refunds the postage to the sender).
Ah, that must be why when I look at the tracker for packages (I don't remember if it was FedEx or UPS), it will show me that the truck with my package on it is literally less than 100 feet away, but my package won't be delivered for another 4-6 hours. After that they end up driving all the way out of the county and back before it's delivered.
@@wrob08 That's part of it, yes. I have people make comments to me all the time because they'll see I'm less than a mile away but it takes 6 hours or so to get to them. It's because a typical delivery driver has about 120-250 stops depending on the route.
Sometimes I'll have 200 stops in one single neighborhood alone. So I might be less than a mile away but there's still 199 stops between me and that customer's house
Anyone who has played any game with trains will know that, while much harder to set up and a big pain in the ass, once set up they are AMAZING at transporting in bulk and the fact we don't use trains as much as we should is a crime.
Honestly it's a pretty simple logical conclusion, a truck can haul a single trailer sometimes 2 versus trains hauling dozens that alone should be more than enough to incentivize using trains over trucks.
@@lilbigbozo pffff try doing that on city skylines
Openttd?
The crazy part is that this country operated on trains and has moved away from it.
@@yolo_burrito ugh seriously. The technology has only gotten more and more efficient, so there's no reason as to why we have done what we have done.
As a freight conductor I get to see the abandoned spurs and industry leads everyday. It's sad how much we've lost. What it really comes down to is cost. Trucking is cheap because we subsidize it so much. Add a VMT that actually pays for the damage trucks are doing and some of the tonnage will shift back to rail. The STB will also have to crack down on PSR and zoning will have to be updated to include rail spurs, as Alan said, for this to really take off.
I do not know where you all are getting your information, trucking is not, NOT SUBSIDIZED. THE trucks pay more in road tax, use tax, fuel tax, tolls, insurances, etc. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A TRAIN DELIEVER TO MY HOUSE OR ANYONE ELSES HOUSE.
YOUR INFORMATION IS SOOOOO FLAWED.
@@greenbeenie2 My friend, let me start by saying, is Conrail? Let me follow with the following: it is not direct subsidization of which he speaks. Roads, highways, and other infrastructure used by trucks is paid for using taxes and money from the government. In the case of rail, the 'road' aka tracks are owned by the companies using them. The subsidization in this case is that government is paying for the infrastructure.
Bless you for your work and keeping rail alive.
I hope for the VMT to go into effect so trucks and companies will actually start paying for the roads they damage. I shouldn't have to pay more to fix streets where I live, doing 1/10,000th of the road damage as a trucking company, paying zero taxes to fix the roads, passing through and creating the potholes in the first place.
@@greenbeenie2 Why would trains have to pay road tax if they run on rails lol 😆
@@greenbeenie2 Did you even watch the video? Trucks do 99% of the wear and tear, but only 35% of the taxes. Also taxes from vehicles aren't enough for their cost and roads end up being subsidized by other taxes. I've also never had a freight truck deliver to my house because that's dumb. The last-leg delivery is almost always vans. I think you're the one with flawed logic here.
A lot of people in the US and Britain who advocate for rail modernisation seem to think freight traffic is the enemy, oddly. But this video is a great explanation why it's not.
as long as it's kept on a separate track so passenger trains and go speeding past them or they move the same speed as passenger trains they can work fine with little to no delays from them.
Meanwhile, I look at the Bay Ridge Branch in Brooklyn (no, seriously, I can just look right out the window) and I imagine a mixed passenger/freight line where all trains run on electricity (it's currently used just for diesel-hauled freight, but it once had passenger service as well as electrification and could reclaim both in the future). The Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel -- a project that's decades in the making -- would only help to improve logistics, which is especially important because Long Island's only direct connections to anything else are all in NYC.
@@davidty2006 really you just need semi regular stretches of track for the two trains to pass eachother
The big problem is what most politicians see has rail modernisation is 250kmh plus railways and indead rail freight dosent fitt in that (were did the high speed mail train idea go? ). Meanwhile cargo rail gets overlooked in most cases even in the railfreight paradises like Switzerland
The new tunnels are all 2 track only so alot of the cargo trains end up on the old mountain tracks
The reason why is that Freight Trains are the ones that get in the way of passenger trains and since the track is owned by that Freight company, the passenger train ALWAYS has to wait, so it's easy for fans of passenger trains, like me, to hate Freight Trains
"A severe lack of regional and national planning" = Socialized infrastructure for expensive roads, free market infrastructure for cheap freight rail
It's all about incentives. If you free market the roads as well, road owners would incur higher costs from trucks to pay for maintenance, driving shipping to trains. Theoretically, at least.
As a locomotive engineer with 20yrs of service I can say with 100% confidence that the problem is that the railroads do not see themselves as a customer service industry. They see it as the customers work for them rather than them providing a service to the customers.
If I were a corporate raider with access to several billion dollars I would take over CSX and could probably increase their profits just by being reasonable.
@@TigerofRobare 100% agree
seeing a rav 4 being lighter than an "average car" feels wrong on so many levels
Most of the old ones are pretty lightweight. Small little 4 cylinder suvs.
An average car in the US is a Suburban, Tahoe, or Escalade.
Y'know, for a single person to grab groceries.
@@BearerOfDreams it's still an SUV, and has never been small compared to the average sedan.
@@garethbaus5471 any medium to large sedan will be 3,500 - 4,500 lbs
@@Marquipuchi In the US.
Working in an Amazon warehouse was probably the lowest I've ever felt in my whole life. Thankfully I only did it for a few months and had options to leave, saw alot of people stuck working there because they were afraid of losing benefits
Wouldn't say loved it, but it paid alright and was pretty easy/chill
@@dkis8730 some people get along well with repetitive jobs they can listen to music/podcasts to!
2:30 That parking slot is crazy, how on earth a parking is bigger that the entire facility
That’s for another video… public transportation 😁
I suggest you guys to watch the video on suburbs of America and public transportation.
"That parking slot is crazy, how on earth a parking is bigger that the entire facility"
About 75% of shopping centers have the same feature. The further from a city, the cheaper the land.
@@wisenber Most of the shopping centers I've been to either had underground parking or they didn't have parking
@@xalex7923 Try getting out of a large city. Even mid-sized cities have more land for parking than the building.
If they don't have parking, they don't have customers. And suburban drivers avoid paid parking like the plague.
Speaking from personal experience here. I farm near Union Pacific Global IV. It's a massive intermodal facility where UP unit container trains are loaded and unloaded. The road traffic is so heavy that all of the intersections near the yard have Oregon trail sized ruts in the lanes that trucks use. Due to the tax revenue that the yard generates local legislators make no effort to force the UP or the warehouses to make necessary infrastructure improvements. (oh and they're going to build even more warehouses without rail connection). Keep freight on the rails for local delivery! Chicago used to do this so well, and now most of the Chicago short-lines are bought up, dead, or dying. This is definitely a rant, but the topic is very important to me.
The giant IC and PRR freighthouses right downtown were torn down and local freight moved to the highways. And yet now the Class I's traffic is what also prevents Metra and Amtrak from providing good service in many places. In other words, nationalization is the future lol
FACTS
@@bipbipletucha the best services every provided were private. NYC, PRR, etc. All private. Costs were low because they competed heavily. Now explain why someone should take a 48 hr train ride from NYC to SF vs a 6 hr flight.
There's your problem.
@@jamesmcmahonii8433 Eh, why are you bringing up passenger transport in a thread on freight attached to a video on freight?
@@DebatingWombat the video suggests freight delivery e.g. 2 day shipping is a primary cause of crumbling infra when the majority of vehicles are passenger based.
Trucks can't come off the roads the concentration just moves to local delivery even with more trains as the good still requires delivery. My local CSX yard doubles in size every 5 years. 10 yrs ago it never changed ever. From the CSX yard chemical containers are interchanged and freight is placed on trucks to distribution centers including Amazon where goods go out for local delivery. The freight costs are pretty low already since there is comp between CSX, CP Rail, and NS. Nationalizing freight artificially reduces costs as they would be subsidized via taxes so our shipping costs just moved they didn't decrease. I'd rather have competition to drive prices vs the government choosing prices. But bring back competition so new companies could exist. There were hundreds of companies 50 yrs ago. There's what 5 now? I've got 1000s of dead track mileage around me in NYS including old distribution centers. We have politics that prevent say Amazon buying an old distribution center with direct rail service and refurbishing it but CSX can scale what they already own. There's 0 service to the Adirondacks. Frieght goes straight to Montreal. Again politics block creating those distribution centers north of me so trucks are the only option. Even the rails going to a large stone quarry were removed because the customers are all local now.
Passenger vehicles could be reduced vs moved with better rail svc. This is where a real difference could be made. NYC is a 3.5 hr drive with traffic from me. 2.5 via train and there's no tolls. But I can only access a train 2x/wk and a tix costs $150 through nationalized Amtrak. Privatize profitable passenger traffic and now vehicles could come off the roads. Amtrak is nationalized and the service is terrible so road traffic remains high, breaking down the infra. That's why I bring up passenger service.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy how the cost of roads is shared between everyone in the country, yet the cost of rails is paid only by the owner/user. So taking the bolt bus is always cheaper than amtrak, even though it's less energy efficient.
I'm not sure intercity buses are less efficient than trains. They carry many people at once, and require little initial capital investment
@@sciencecw buses carry many people yes, but trains carry far far more. In terms of energy efficiency, its quite simply the lower rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel track that win out against rubber tires on asphalt. Buses may have lower capital costs, only because road infrastructure is funded by all taxpayers while railroads need to build their own track. This is more of a socio-economic inefficiency that we need to reconsider
@@dxkaiyuan4177 tracks and rail ROW are more expensive. That's why rail only has economy of scale in big cities. They also have a large carbon footprint
@@sciencecw Do you have data on the carbon footprint argument? Cause I'd guess when talking about big cities trains, since they are electrified and have much less rolling resistance they would use much less energy thus Carbon, specially when you take into account most buses are ICE
@@dxkaiyuan4177 You know, I heard that, on 9/11, when all air transport was shut down, it effectively made Amtrak the only form of long-distance transportation. All airlines received heavy subsidies, totaling $15 billion. Amtrak, on the other hand, didn't even get a single penny.
I would want more trains to simply travel. The Japanese lifestyle seems so cool. Maybe it's just rose tinted glasses but being able to bike or take a train to most places seems nice.
I'm an American living in Japan, it is nice.
Born in Japan, and living in America. Can confirm our rail infrastructure is booty
I'm from Europe not Japan but trains are brilliant. You don't have to drive everywhere. Kids don't need to rely on parents to get to most places. And it's normally faster and more convenient than driving... I can get to a destination in 3 hours, whilst watching movies or working, compared to 6+ hours driving... Where I cannot be productive at all.
@@p0neh1 just to have the option would be nice but everywhere is built with cars only.
Some places have a nice bicycle infrastructure, but stuff is still far.
Would be nice to hop on a train to the springs...or home...oh well
Just watched a video of not just bikes about the Swiss railways. They are awesome. Even the smallest towns have their railway stations. And the connectivity between different train routes is very well organised. I live in the Netherlands, and walking plus trains are my favoured way of transportation. And that is not always easy to manage.
The focus of Amazon is the "last mile problem", it costs the most in the entire shipping process.
@Blake Belladonna Ah yes, nothing more capable and efficient than an electric van. Renowned for their robustness, reliability and longevity!
@@charlesbrown4483 Charlie Brown, renowned for his ability to take the bait and fall flat every time.
@@charlesbrown4483 to be fair i drive my amazon van a total of 40 miles (at most) delivering 350 packages. not sure why it needs to be a gas guzzler
@@charlesbrown4483 I know you’re being sarcastic, but the good old milk float lasted for so long precisely because it does have those qualities. maintenance is really low on an electric drive, and local delivery uses predictable routes at fairly slow speeds anyway. Running costs are cheap, so a bunch of them ran for 40 or 50 years with no major rebuilds.
There's two trains here in Australia that have the words "Real trains not road trains" painted on the side of the locomotive. Road trains are trucks with 3 or more trailers on the back.
Those are a bit more efficient than a regular semi-truck, and don't they mostly operate in rural/wilderness regions where the roads are largely unpaved anyway?
If the road was paved when they started it isn't when they're done.
@@kysafe um... not state, Australia, Sure there are small triples in the US, but "Road Trains" is term for Australia.
@@kysafe Oh, ok, Australia is again the only place that I'm aware of that uses that terminology, here in the states it's doubles/triples, or some variation of that.
@@blaness13 he's asking which state in Australia uses that term "Real trains not road trains", you do know the USA isn't the country in the world with states right?
Amazon is shipping some of their stuff by rail. As part of this Amazon and UPS have partnered with Union Pacific to offer free all you can carry shopping to locals in the LA area who own bolt cutters.
LOL
Where's Barney Fife?
haha yeah cape town (south africa) also has really good legacy rail infrastructure (albeit at a peculiar track width). Like rail access throughout one of the main industrial areas (epping). Anyway no one uses trains because of theft. Like if its not the cargo it’s the overhead copper cables 😭
@@SWAGCOWVIDEO Yeah, the amount of packages that comes through rail contributes to about 50% of the volume on any given day. OP's basically saying that trains would effectively be the perfect middle mile solution. Especially if want to make autonomous vehicles work.
@@cdoublejj doubt anyone gets that reference these days 🤣
The thing that I dislike about the whole 2 day shipping thing (amazon or otherwise) is I don't even want the thing I ordered that fast! I genuinely don't care... If I need something immediately, I go buy it in person. If I could tick a box that said, "take your time and let the people in the warehouse have a pee break when they are supposed to work on my package. Just get this package to me some time in the next month." I would tick that box every time...
I was like: "my man's about to say trains isn't he". Alan Fisher said trains AND I CLAPPED. Seriously though it's almost shocking just how much better trains are for almost any application
Rule of thumb from my asphalt class: 1 semi = ~10,000 cars.
For very low traffic roads, weather can control. But even with minimal truck traffic, they easily make up the majority of road wear.
Glad we finally dispelled the myth about cars costing more than they contribute in taxes.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 They cost us in carbon emissions. What i'm glad about is that the "You don't pay for the roads, so don't ride on them" argument used against cyclists is invalid, since cyclists cause pretty much no damage to the roads.
@@barto22 But they do. Roads used by cyclists still need to be built and maintained. Plus they're stealing valuable lane space from drivers who are paying for them.
At least we agree that this is really about le climate change, not improving travel for commuters.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 One cyclist on a road takes up how much of a road compared to one car? This argument is based on the idea: One more bicycle on the road is one less car on the road. By logic, that means more bike traffic equates to less cars, and less cars means better traffic!
Of course, how much does it really matter when everyone likes to drive 30 miles just because a car allows them to go the distance quickly? Inefficiency just because we can is such a human trait
@@tylerbird8870 one bike take up less space on the road yes, but need to be passed since it does not drive at car speed.
Separate, well maintained bike-lanes, that go to the destination, are much better (like much of the Netherlands have).
It also makes it safer for bikers which makes it more likely that someone would take the bike instead of a car.
I can assure yall Alan ain't lying. In India freight costs are dirt cheap and whatever you order off of Amazon you'll get it in around a week. They mostly use railways here (wHICH IS NATIONALIZED but slowly being privatized these days💔) and not only is the shipping cost low, you'll know that your delivery hasn't caused too much emissions + trucks in India are insanely dangerous bc our roads are shit. India is literally train heaven but because of recent privatization drives it has a bleak future.
Edit #1: y'all are clowns asf lmao. A week long shipping is actually not a long time, plus it's the default shipping time. Even if you take up one day shipping it'll be shipped through trains. I usually don't take up same day shipping because Amazon delivery workers are worked to death here, and their wages are way too low for them to care about the handling of the product.
Edit #2: racists fuck off. Nobody shits on the streets or tracks. Literally nobody. No one asked for your opinion on India's population explosion. Shut the fuck up.
Are the trains themselves being privatized with the track staying nationalized like britain?
Or are both trains and track being Privatized?
Do trains in India have a standard gauge now? I thought at one time each rail line had a different gauge so cars were not compatable.
@@matt3950 all have the same gauge: wide. Even in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
@@davidty2006 tracks stay public. We funded them!! Only thing is, private trains are being introduced.
@@redradcomrade from what I have seen so far, the private train business will only be for certain medium to long-distance premium trains, or for premium service on some trains (like what Pullman in the US used to be). I don't think IR intends to privatise most systems.
Another reason the truck loading docks at the Switzerland IKEA are smaller is because in Europe most trucks are actually loaded from the side as opposed to the rear. The trailers have side curtains and a forklift is usually used to load and unload the trailer.
I recently had a package that traveled via one of the "express package trains" run by China Railways. I didn't know they existed before that. They are entirely made up of baggage cars, timetabled as a limited stop express passenger train, and hauled by semi-highspeed electric passenger locomotives. CR seems to have found a way to use its spare capacity as passenger travel shifts more and more towards the high-speed network and locomotive hauled passenger trains are being phased out. The speed is extremely competitive, topping out at 160km/h (or 100mph), and being essentially the highest priority trains in the network means not much can slow them down. These things actually have higher priority than most passenger trains. It took less than a day for my package to travel from Shenzhen to Beijing which would have taken at least 2 most likely 3 days by truck. Currently, they mostly operate between major cities where package volume is high. Not sure if this can be expanded to cover lower volume destinations while retaining their efficiency and speed. But seems like a pretty successful attempt at wining back some express package traffic whist using existing rolling stock.
Thats pretty dope. High-speed delivery trains.
Question: what was the price of delivery compared to truck? Was it competitive?
@@almond5560 I don't know for sure. But it was covered under the standard delivery charge from the seller so I'd assume it is comparable to trucking.
@@semicolontransistor interesting. Thanks for the info
Man, this is even more depressing. Canada is still stuck in the dark ages. Travel times the same as by car, and certainly no high speed rail for cargo.
For train fans then Switzerland is a prime destination
Yeah swiss know how to do trains.
@@davidty2006 I actually got to meet with an official from the Swiss Federal Railways and go into the staff only area at the Bern train station, got a small tour and some explanations on how the SBB works plus their future plans.
@@train7163 cool im from thun
The Be 6/8 III is one sexy beast.
one day i'm gonna take the Rhätische Bahn to Triano
I am so glad my local state just bought the small local railroad here. Should help with brining regular passenger service back and secure cargo services here.
Which state?
@@thegreypenguin5097 Lower Saxony
Nice
@@MrMakabar welche Strecke?
@@nolibtard6023 OHE, alle Strecken, mit Lüneburg - Bleckede und Lüneburg - Soltau gibt es Pläne für die Aufnahme von Passagierbetrieb. Nach Bleckede gab es sogar schon einen erfolgreichen Testbetrieb.
When you mentioned that the trucks must back into the space to load and unload, I died a bit on the inside. I haven't played Eurotruck Simulator nor have I actually trucked before. I am but a humble truck stop worker that has to do garbage runs. It takes forever for one of those trucks to back into a single spot.
amazon would significantly improve their image in my mind if they just paid for their own freight rail infrastructure between warehouses. Companies are generating more money than nations of the world, they need to start investing back into the systems they affect most
That's the secret though, they're billionaires and they don't care, and the government is worse. I would love if America was fixed but that requires competence
Switching to railroad would undoubtedly be their biggest success if they decided to do that, reducing their future labor costs and gas-guzzling costs by a landslide.
Not only that, but it would also encourage other competing companies to adopt railroads as their primary source of nationwide shipping, thus giving railroad more popularity and maybe changing the minds of car-centric Americans, making them less car-centric.
I’m telling ya, Amazon NEEDS to do this. Not just for their company but also for their people.
@@ItFoundMe Given how price sensitive Amazon's warehouse and retail operation is, I suspect that they've already ran the numbers on that. Why they didn't adopt it is a different story.
There was just a study released (German) that found that normal visible light has a surprising big effect on the life span of the aspalt. So far nobody has researched it because everyone thought it was mainly the UV rays that do the damage and visible light was ignored. They found out because in the lab their test matter had changed while it was stored for future usage in an UV blocking place.
so asphalt can't handle sunlight ?
finally a reason to put Teslas and all other cars in tunnels /s
I presume you refer to the paper 'Daylight causes road damage' published by EurekAlert and carried out by Vienna University Of Technology, Austria (sic.), and I quote from the paper 'The strongest effect actually occurs in the UV range, but the effects of visible light are similarly drastic'.
Thankfully, rail lines are not made of asphalt.
@@Avero_ Sorry, but in the tunnels they don't drive on asphalt but concrete.
@@michaeloreilly657 Sounds like it - I read a newspaper article, not a study ;)
It's certainly surprising that nobody tested that in a century of asphalted roads.
The issue of trucks not paying their way on public roads is not unique to the USA. Abolishing this hidden subsidy would go at least some way towards moving freight back to the railways.
@@franksgump5 Yes, they do. But they don't pay an amount that represents the costs they impose. As pointed out in the video, almost all the damage to roads is caused by trucks, so they should pay almost all the cost of repairing roads, and they don't.
@@franksgump5 It is generally accepted that , depending on which research you prefer, the damage done to a road by a vehicle is proportional to the 4th or 5th power of the axle weight. A ten ton truck with two axles has axle weight 10 times the axle weight of 1 ton car. So it is doing between 10,000 and 100,000 times as much damage to the road. It also tends to spend much more time on the road than a car that is not used for commercial purposes.
@@franksgump5 As regards how vehicle taxes are spent, that's a matter for politicians. But the best allocation of resources is achieved when people pay the true cost of those resources. If people had to pay significantly more for goods delivered quickly by truck, they might decide to pay it, or they might decide to use a solution that is more efficient in the use of resources, but takes longer. That would be their choice, but they'd be paying the proper cost of their decision, not be subsidised by other people.
@@franksgump5 I know it is an odd question but which trucks do you use. I mean which models?
@@franksgump5 let's be honest, the government is the one who destroyed the railroad companies in the 50's to 70's, it wasn't really trucks and cars that did, it's actually the government that did, because they made them pay higher taxes of the companies which made them bankrupt etc, but in the 80's they lower the taxes.
I think yours is among the best urbanist/transit oriented channels on RUclips. In addition to informational, you're very engaging and speak with charisma, something many other urbanist channels could learn from (not hating on them). Great work.
"Is the answer always trains?"
Well I know one thing for sure, the answer is certainly trains a hell of a lot more often than we use trains as the solution.
Well, it doesn't have to be traditional rail either. Cargo trams have been proposed, and could half traffic in the inner city where traditional rail won't easily get there. And I suppose "cargo metros" would also work to some extent. These are just trains in a different form.
@@the11382 "Cargo metros" Aren't metros just smaller, slower trains?
@@wta1518 They are trains, but different. Speed and accessibility are a tradeoff. A vehicle that goes just below the speed of sound can't stop by your house specifically.
@@the11382 Yes, but my point is that a cargo metro would just be a normal cargo train.
MAnnnnnnN trains aRE so cool, those big powerful engines, the ability to pull ToNs of weight, and the fact they are just awesome. In australia trains are seen as job stealing and old school, it kinda sucks. Thanks for the super cool video my dude. (:
At least you have electrification in cities and good trams
This comment reads do much differently when you substitute MAnnnnnnN with NNnnnnnnG
@@GodisGracious1031Ministries Train driver will be needed for freight or suburban even if it has some level of autonomy.
Have you seen the razor train at 8:49, how is it even possible to make something that is literally two rectangles stacked on top of each other plus some protrusions exceedingly aesthetic looking.
it is here too. part of the reason why we dont have a good train system.
Other than all the benefits you've already listed here, I'd like to add just one more benefit to using trains for warehousing: Trains are far cooler than trucks. Trains 1, Trucks 0
@@PauxloE He never said anything about "older"
Debatable. Have you seen Optimus Prime?
Trains 55000, Trucks 0.
Trains go choo choo!!
@@orppranator5230 have you seen raiden
I was delighted to see the mega swing intermodal car at 10:31 with the DB Schenker logo. I work for this company and our goal is to provide innovative solutions in logistics.
The real issue is that we don't pay the environmental costs associated with shipping. If we did, then suddenly less "right now shipping" would be much more acceptable for everyone.
We are just pushing it away. It is the same thing with global shipping, we are not paying the price for burning all the fuel that it does, we are just pushing it to the planet.
so much this. I mean we are paying, but not in dollars at purchase
I agree trucking destroys highways more than smaller vehicles at an exponential rate, but I don't believe this problem to be uniquely Amazon. Most if not all big box retailers use just in time logistics.
Yes but how else will I trick normies into watching a video about train logistics
@@alanthefisher as always trains are the answer AATATA
That’s the thing though. Aren’t just in time delivery logistics better suited for trucks? It’s not impossible to use boxcars for that but like 95 percent of warehouses in America don’t seem to bother.
For long haul stuff it seems companies like Amazon would rather stick their containers and trailers on an intermodal train if they need to go long distance. That’s better, but it still creates issues.
@@totoroben on one hand, people complain that the microwave society is destructive. On the other, they love their overnight delivery
@@alanthefisher Talk about a company synonymous with trucking, like Wal-Mart.
Switzerland is an nearly solitary exception rather than the rule when it comes to the handling of freight by nationalized carriers, especially when it comes to small customers. Nationalized railways in Europe (when not operating in a planned economy) have an abysmal record when it comes to freight and its only with recent open access reforms that the situation has somewhat improved. In Germany DB did their own version of PSR called MORA-C in the 1990s where they set minimum traffic requirements for customers. If these were not met they would pull the switch. Many customers who wanted service had to involuntarily switch to trucks after these reforms. The situation is even worse in further western countries like France and Spain where freight is on many lines simply nonexistent and modal share of rail freight negligible. The Swiss rail freight system is amazing but exists through heavy regulation and equally heavy subsidies. The Swiss railways are indeed a model but one thats hard to replicate due to many factors, a big one being the direct democracy system. For freight rail the US still does a far better job than most of the world, despite the best efforts of the Class 1s. The shortline railroads do a much better job serving smaller customers than either a Class 1 or a nationalized carrier would. Similar such operations are starting to appear in Germany and elsewhere in Europe too, operating under open access framework. It does bear mentioning that the one nationalized US carrier abandoned 1000s of miles of trackage and left many towns and customers without rail service.
This is all a fair set of points. I think Alan has a great mindset about refocusing the US on rail, but simply pointing at another country and saying we should replicate their model is a little naive (though I’ll give him credit it gets the conversation started). We absolutely should be taking ideas and solutions from other countries who do things better, but we can’t just copy paste, we need to make sure those solutions are tweaked and toned to work properly here in the US.
@@spartan117zm Every country should copy everything Switzerland does. The world would be much better. Not perfect, but much better.
@@JackFate76 Please dont...my heart was sucked into a black hole when I learned what americans sell as swiss cheese in the US.
Switzerland does not subsidies cargo freight. There are Talks now, to do so.
The Issue with DB is, they also own a trucking company. What they do is, get the money from the government for rail maintenance and use it to finance their trucking business. That way they are being financed twice by the government, as the road they used are also payed with tax money.
India's dedicated freight corridor video in the end to cap it all off is absolutely brilliant.
At the very least, having a national infrastructure entity for rail like the UK would be a huge benefit. Private rail companies, especially the Class Is don't invest in very basic things. There's a reason why there's an epidemic of derailments and crashes in the US. They don't invest in maintaining the rail, they don't invest in maintaining the equipment, they don't invest in barriers and grade separation, and most importantly, they don't invest in their workers. Leaving them to maintain a network is insane... and the statistics show how badly they do. If you can't buy them out completely, would make a lot of sense to buy the rails and have operators pay to use them, financing the improvements and upkeep.
I mentioned using rail freight more for more varied types of delivery on a CNBC video comment about the supply chain shortages in America and the main complaint was from previous customers of railways there, complaining about how awful those companies had been with tracking/losing their shipments. If only the freight railways in the US were not owned by the worst companies... Because the majority of comments were positive and said we need more rail delivery. I'm ignoring the one where I was called a Commi 😂.
This problem is perhaps not unique to USA, in Czechia there were some cases, not long ago, where cargo had traveled hundreds of kilometres despite station of origin and destination were mere 20 km apart and it took over week to deliver it.
You were called a commie for wanting more rail delivery services?
I can understand being called a commie for nationalization. (I personally don't agree with a complete nationalized railroad network) but damn thats Harsh.
@@bonda_racing3579 yeah, people are... Special 😂😂😂
@@bonda_racing3579 Id sat the biggest problem with nation RRs in the US is your trading 80s business men for career criminal who business model operates at less than 1% efficiency.
In France they talked about trains replacing trucks for decades! As France is a massive transit country. The motorways are choker blocked with trucks.
But nothing has been done. Just political promises a few decades ago.
Meanwhile 1 way Singapore could reduce road truck traffic is when it replaces its 4 container ports with the Tuas MegaPort, which'd eliminate the need to transport containers between different ports if they're to be transshipped thru the country from 1 ship to another that've each docked @ different ports
It's the exact same situation in the US except it's with passenger rail and not freight!
Nothing has been done because promises to remove trucks don't pan out in reality. Trucks backing up motorways is caused by setting up transit hubs outside of cities, we want less trucks on urban roads.
Shifting longhaul freight to trains cannot solve this problem because trains do not deliver to end users, no matter what you end back at trucks on the road.
Now either you set up rail hubs outside of cities like we do with truck freight which wont remove trucks from our highways.
or you place them in cities and unto 70 years of progress on reducing congestion and pollution from trucks in cities.
Rolling stock fan's will never be convinced rail isn't always the answer and so it's an easy win for politicians, Most people know the promise is total bollocks so they ignore it and those swayed by it will be swayed by the next rail promise and the next one and next one, so there's no need to make good on the promise.
biggest problem in France is that most electrifided lines witch arent't TGV are still 1,5kV DC
And meanwhile Poland massively invests in its National Railways - Warsaw West Station is the best example.
I agree we need to move back to rail. I really hate all the short lines that have been converted to walking trails. However, nationalizing the railroads won't solve anything. What we need to do is find creative ways to make rail more attractive and profitable for shippers. Either way we as consumers are footing the bill.
"For that bike lock to reach your steps, a few key things have to happen"
Thank you for showing footage of India's electrified double-stack freight trains. This is myth-busting stuff (especially for North Americans)
We run double stacked freight trains in north America all the time...
@@wesleymccoy870 Rémi's point is that double stacking is often used as an argument against electrification when the footage showed double stacking with electrification.
Quick correction: from what I could learn, neither the network nor the railway operators are 100% nationalized. The ownership structures between different railways operators can vary wildly. However, where the Swiss Federal Railways operate, they mostly run on their own tracks, and some regional and private operators have their own bits of tracks too. In general though, the ownership follows this kind of pattern: first you have the confederation (Swiss gov.) and the local cantons or groupings of cantons who own the majority stake, and only after that come the share of corporate and individual investors. My guess is that, this way you can accept private investment while still making sure the public bodies are the ones making plans and making decisions, which I think is a mentality that feels mainstream enough that it could work in other parts of the world too. And even with this funding splitting going on, the Swiss state invests about 7-8 times as much in the rail network per capita than even countries like Germany and France.
In the end, what makes the Swiss rail be so reliable and on-time is not some magic (and overly patriotic) imagination of "swissness", but instead an adequate amount of funding, and well planned out processes and structures of the organizations themselves that make maintenance and operation as efficient as they are. This is something we can learn from, no matter where we are.
Another thing i heard about Switzerland is that they do not need the ok from the European Union and has freedom to decide and fund what they want to . Switzerland limits how many trucks can enter at the boarder every 24 hours but always supplies the option of freight rail service at a cost of course . Austria and Germany wanted to force large amounts of freight onto the rails much in the same way as Switzerland mostly due to wear and tare on highways by trucks , but the EU vetoed most of it .
@Ih, Ey! Ya i know it sounds like that , i realised that but Switzerland doesn't hafta worry about "discriminating" other EU countrys ( nor does Norway ) . But this should be understood for those that think they will just copy Switzerland in railway policies . Germany is dragging their heals building out railway upgrades in part because they are restricted in charging transit trucks for the real cost of Autobahn infrastructure . I meant truck tollls at the boarders . Switzerland has truck restictions at the boarders . Switzerland litteraly has a maximum truck counter at the boarder well bellow the max freight , over an above that number and the rest needs to go by train or wait . EU countrys are NOT allowed to do this .
@@lassepeterson2740 @Ih, Ey! (how does one tag multiple people on youtube help, this used to be a lot easier)
Yeah, and how things are going with the coalition agreement in Germany cars and trucks will pretty much still get a free pass on everything infrastructure related. The new transport minister is from the libertarian FDP party and said he will be the "advocate of the car drivers" and pretty much continue to uphold the status quo. No tolls nor speed limits in sight for us. Just pain.
@@lassepeterson2740 oh yeah and thanks for letting me know about the swiss truck limit, I didn't actually know about those!
@@lassepeterson2740 germany has truck tolls on all roads
"Is the answer always 'trains'?"
No.
But its the answer way way more often then we currently use.
How America could still function to this day with its endless inefficiencies amazes me.
Anything is possible with the amount of money we have
As someone who has been living in switzerland for 11 years, amazon doesn't exist here. Mabye its for the best because we go buy our stuff at local town shops. I've also heard that its the first country that has 100% of its rail infrastructure electrified and i can say that ive never been on a diesel train in switzerland even in the most remote mountain village. I love my country so much honestly.
That is no surprise when coal was expensive, yet water abundant, who in their right mind would burn something imported when, since late 19th century you can just spin generators for free and run trains virtually for free? In other countries it was like, they had a coal, that was cheap, but not enough water resources, so it made no sense to burn coal in power plants, then produce electricity and then use it for running trains, as they would have to not only pay for coal, but for all the maintenance and construction of overhead wires and they would need power plant like every 10-15 miles or so with systems that were available back then.
In Korea, we have one day shipping on alot of products, and the roads here don't look nearly that bad. It's largely the result of sprawl and lack of suburban tax revenue for suburban roads imo
Korea has on average much younger roads than the U.S. Give it 50 years or so and it will likely look different. Of course, sprawls etc plays into that as well as other factors, such as that Korea has much less heavy freight traffic over all.
Britain is known for it's potholes.
But rail network is better than the US with possible plans of delivery companies operating their own trains.
@@davidty2006 I think the U.S. Actually has a substantially larger freight modal share than Britain.
I love when a trucker tells a railroader: "iD lIke tO sEe a tRaIn dElIvEr pRoDuCtS tO tHe dOor" Um, yeah, it's called "spotting cars", the fuck do you think an industry spur is? a boxcar - or FOUR truckloads - can be spotted right up to a building with ease. RR's have been doing it for literally more than a century.
you literally didn't give an answer to the statement lol. trains cant deliver to your house or to majority or stores. you just look so stupid right now; Trucks will ALWAYS be needed but definitely could be less relied on for long distance only.
And yet you mofos wonder why there is a suppy chain issue. All it takes is for my fellow truckers to stop for a week and you would starve. You are the most ungrateful mofos on the planet. I swear that people like you have had life easy. If you have no compassion for any person way of living, how do you expect anyone to care? Oh do it for the planet. That will fall on deff ears. Change you're god damn attitude if you want people to care. Fuckin entitle twat.
To Michlo3 : I've looked around online for "spotting cars". Couldn't find any references to what you were describing. Would you have a link or a different name for it?
Very few truckers actually deliver to your door, they generally deliver to hubs that distribute the packages to smaller delivery vehicles, which is pretty similar to how a railroad would have to deliver goods.
@@Urhoboman5 That's what we call it, or local industry switching perhaps. You don't possibly think I'm making this up now, do you? I lack such an imagination.
Local freight is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Unless nationalization takes over and mandates come in local freight is gonna be a rare oddity. I worked for at NS in Louisville, KY and the amount of local freight had diminished almost entirely. There’s unused tracks everywhere and yards are getting torn up left and right. Word of mouth before I left was that they were talking about shutting down the terminal in Louisville completely in favor of focusing on thru freight. Which even then takes 12 hours to travel what would take 2-1/2 in a truck. Our rail infrastructure is so dated. A lot of it is single track territory and not to mention having to run PTC is a nightmare. Got called to recrew a train whose second engine went out and couldn’t make it over the hill which in turn blocked the single main line. Long story short, it took us 9 hours to travel 10 miles light engine to fetch that train. Trains had backed up at almost every siding in my division. The thing is a few of them were train ID’s from 3-5 days ago. Seeing firsthand how inefficient and chaotic the rail system is, I doubt we’ll switch back to rail anytime soon.
City buses are also quite heavy and put a lot of wear on road surfaces. The difference is that mass transit is actually economically productive. Of course trains would be even better.
Look no further than Tokyo for proof that subways and trains are all you need in 90% of areas IF they are actually done correctly. Buses and such make up that 10% of harder to reach areas. Not only is it the best public transport in the world, it is also very profitable.
If mass transit is economically productive then why does it rely heavily on subsidies?
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 not sure about massively economic but for public transit to become profitable it needs more people to use it. One area that is never talked about is how do we make people use public transit more often because realistically no government can go from shit transit to Tokyo overnight and start restricting road space for private vehicles.
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 erm... Tokyo public transport ISN'T subsidised. You must be American
@@nonyafkinbznes1420 Lots of things require public investment to produce a financial return: basic scientific research is probably the best example. Economically productive does not mean profitable for shareholders in the short term.
Well, ever since "big Oil", GM, and other truck, bus and automotive special interest groups got their foothold on the U.S. government scheme of things, both passenger and freight railroading took a nosedive. Railroads were pretty much on their own as they received no subsidies in comparison to automotive road and interstate construction. That's why railways in Europe and Asia, while although looked down upon by some in the USA, will ALWAYS be light years ahead of U.S. railroading. People here are interested in one form of "climate". It's the one that fulfills the greed of the powerful special interest groups no matter the damage done to the environment or to the people who choke in it. Just sayin'. But your video was definitely spot on.
don't forget the local and short range airlines like southwest. give them a bit more credit
@@SeedemFeedemRobots
Oh No, we definitely can't forget about the airlines.
Climate science is manipulated by those same interests. It's deeper than greed. It's power and control. Look up Steven E Koonin (recently on JRE)...
Amazon, governments, banks, all corrupted by the same force. Once we get them out (psychopaths) we will not have to worry about this any more. As long as we keep aware that psychopaths exist and will do terrible things to us.
No. This is a common myth. Railroads were greatly subsidized. Passenger trains only made money because the postal service used them to move mail, railroads were given land to build their railroads for practically free, and the government imported a lot of immigrants to keep wages down for labor.
Obvious GM wanted to sell cars, but they didn’t need a secret anti-train conspiracy. People would much rather travel in a personal automobile than a train in most circumstances.
A similar experience in my country, the trucking union got so much power that the ring leader would literally put the whole country to a halt if the local politicians are doing something he doesn't like. And he doesn't like trains.
This channel is just the cult of the train and I love it!
Your sources have blessed me for writing my final essay for a class in my Urban Planning program, I thank you dearly.
As someone who moved from America to central Europe: 2 day shipping is overrated. If I really need something that quickly, I'll just go get it myself (on public transit, no less). Waiting a few days or even one or two weeks isn't all that bad. And it means that sometimes I'll have two or three packages in limbo and then I'll get one and it's kind of like an exciting surprise to guess what arrived in the mail.
Also Swiss rail is amazing, I'm glad I've had the pleasure of riding it. Cheaper than a plane ticket, faster than a bus, serves just as many locations as regional busses, and ALWAYS on time. Plus it is wayyyy more comfortable than even a car. Makes German rail look like shit, and that too is pretty good.
I don't know about other people but as long as I can get it in less than a week, 2 day shipping is excessively fast. I know why Amazon did that, and that's because at the time online shopping had horrendous shipping times unless you paid equally excessive pricing for express shipping, but really what we need isn't 2 day shipping most of the time but 2-4 day shipping, where it'll come either very quickly or acceptably quickly but either way you can still reasonably expect when something will arrive and it feels relatively quick
I have never understood this two day delivery mania with their own cars and so. I always order packages to be delivered either on post office or to one of shops that is partner of other company and then pick them when I have time. Sometime it is delivered nex day, sometimes after three days or so.
That’s why there’s a pretty big divide in languages: if you speak German, odds are German rail is seen as shit, any other language, German rail is probably seen as great
@@genoobtlp4424 I don't know, in Czechia it seems like German railways are considered average at best, but Austrian and Swiss railways are considered great and models to follow. Maybe it is due to exposure to DB. And as well opinion on Germany is turning worse, but we never had this wave of obsession with "cool" Germany that seems to sweeping the world in last decade or so. But perhaps history and bit of nostalgia plays some role as well.
Anyhow for me, personally, Germany is this strange cold dark place that you don't really want to visit. Country that is insincere and which can't be trusted.
@@MrToradragon TIL…
I wish we had more trains.
I work for UPS at the New Jersey Automatic Hub. The fact we didn't work to install rail lines when we have one running behind the other warehouses when we mostly haul irgegulars will baffle me
After looking further into my Union contract with UPS they end up paying more due to the contract for rail than they would trains. Meaning the only reason was to protect trucking jobs we can't fill for because UPS is overly controlling of it's driving staff
I spend a lot of time on google maps tracking rail that I drive over every day and never see traffic. There are TONS of warehouses all throughout the city, many abandoned (yes I check property records too), with access to that unused rail. If I had more capital, or a better plan, there is a massive opportunity there.
It starts to get mind-boggling how much safer and more efficient it could be if we think about the implications of more rail usage for shipping. Like, consider a 100-car freight train travelling at night. It needs perhaps 2-4 people to keep it going, but 'staying awake at the wheel' isn't nearly as serious of a threat as 100 semi-truck drivers on a freeway would have to do. Trains are dedicated lines, no sharing with other kinds of traffic. Very efficient because of the steel on steel connection. While it might be a bit more active with wildlife at night, generally very quiet in terms of human activity outside and wildlife can be protected in high traffic areas with fences and bridges and stuff. But night freight trains are used in some areas, but could be heavily increased in regularity and span if there was the will.
@@coolioso808 The only thing I don't like about it would be putting 100 well paying jobs out of order. Things would *maybe* be cheaper is rail was used, but it makes me sad to think all the big riggers would be out of work. Overall though, you are totally right. Less wear and tear on our roads, safer, the positives far outweigh the potential negatives
@@TheGhostHAG Yeah, the overall positives are there, but of course the people who would be out of work is an issue. Now, if there really was a big cross-country or inter-continental railway improvement project being done, it would require a lot of hands on deck. I'm not saying the skills of truckers are exactly transferable, but I do think there could be a lot of related work on the railways. Even if less conductors are needed for each train, more trains would be needed overall if the network was expanded. Then, of course, more rail-line workers to maintain and improve the system would be necessary.
Some people are against it, but the need for logical transformation of society could be aided by a UBI being implemented. People think that it's giving 'the government' too much control, but the idea is that it's UNconditional income or a dividend for our collective contributions to society and technological advancement, we all get a certain amount and that frees us from dependency on certain jobs or industries for livelihood.
We are going to need a different system, I think, overall. Because the one we have isn't working for most people. Don't get me wrong, most people are working, but the fruits of our labor isn't fair, equitable or sustainable in the way that it could be or should be.
@@coolioso808 Lost me with the second paragraph. Economics matter, and a UBI just people everyone getting it back at zero. Prices will rise dramatically. Taxation will rise dramatically. This can be achieved without government. Otherwise spot on
@@TheGhostHAG If we want to see an improvement in the efficiency, safety and sustainability of society from production to distribution of goods and services we should also expect to see an evolution in our socio-economic system and how it functions. We can't expect the current system to stay basically the same and then still work well. We need a systemic revolution to go with any hopes of a sustainable, efficient, healthy society. Don't you think?
I don't view UBI as an endgame, but rather a transition possibility towards a more sustainable system. If you have any idea how we could create a more sustainable, efficient, healthy system without the ongoing problem increases such as poverty, crime, war and environmental degradation, then I would like to hear it.
You know it's funny I work in one of those Amazon warehouses and we were actually raising this very question in a conversation recently, "How and why does Amazon not have its own dedicated rail lines?"
All class 1s aren’t gonna sell to Amazon. And all the land is already owned by most rail lines. It’s near impossible to build a railroad unless they literally buy out a railroad.
@@NoVaRedacted If any of those companies are publicly traded, Amazon can force a hostile takeover
@@-SP. they can’t really force anything. It would be shut down by the surface transportation board that manages acquiring rights of a railroad.
@@NoVaRedacted Oh I see, I am not familiar with how transportation companies operate and I had assumed it would be like acquiring regular companies
@@-SP. understandable, but yes its just that railroads are too important here to have a company use it for only their product
I live in Brazil, approximately 65% of our cargo is transported by trucks. And as a train person I really do hope the investments in rails increase -_-
My father was a truck driver whose career, interrupted by WWII, spanned from 1939 to 1985. He always said the transcontinental trucking industry wouldn't have existed if the railroads had done their job.
2:38 "distracted driving kills!" on the most distracting sign ever
As small as the UK is it is suffering from the same problems. I live in the small regional town of Hinckley. Before the 1960s major freight in and out went through the freight yard. The infamous Beecham report has done away with all this and freight was put on the roads. The result is highways congested with heavy vehicles digging up the roads. The plan now is to build a new rail freight yard in the pristine countryside.
I lived most of my life in Australia and they have done the same thing. What used to travel by rail now travels by road.
fun solution to this: make amazon pay their share
Amazon isn't the only offender, and they will simply make the customer pay like corporations always do
@@deptusmechanikus7362 fun solution to this: make them pay their fair share
@@ZiggityZeke They won’t ever pay their share. They’ll just push it on us always.
@@deptusmechanikus7362 Which will make people realise what the actual cost is and not order so much stuff.
Fun solution to that: Lower corporate taxes and cut unnecessary government spending.
Trucking companies pay highway use tax and it’s a pretty hefty tax. That part about destroying roads is flawed
Shhh dont tell them that, they just want to perpetuate their anti-American propoganda.
“We solved it with electric vehicles”
*footage of a diesel train*
"Electric." That was a good hook--Diesel electric locomotives.
As someone who works in logistics and tried to use trains ( and why it failed for us repeatedly )
1- building the train is extremely time communing and breaking it up is just as bad so if the whole train is not going the same place this is going to get time consuming and expensive ( I live in a city of 230 000 )
2- trains can not easily pas each other so basically the entire train has to go the same place or sequentially to the same places
3- a train of less than 20 cars is a money loser for the railway and they will not do it ( we tried many times )
4- getting the right of way for a rail siding in an already developed area was going to take millions of dollars and take decades ( and the city planer was not optimistic on it ever happening )
5- the railway will not give a grantee on delivery time of less then 2 weeks ( I mean something enforceable with damages in court , not just saying "yes we will try" ) It costs us money when shipments are late by the day and that cost compounds !
6- the rail system is optimized for bulk goods ( think lumber , oil , sulfer , scrap iron , pig iron , grain , ore ,coal and bulk chemicals ) not huge numbers of individual items like your bike lock . If they are going to ship bike locks they want an entire container of them all going the same place preferably 20 sea containers . They will charge extra for each stop the train will make and the tiem it will spend at your loading dock
I think the video brought up some of these problems as relating to the private railroads adn some could be fixed by nationalizing railroads
@@JacobRy except none of those problems are solved in countries with nationalized railroads... lawl
You addressed something that the video hasn't: unloading time and manpower efficiency. Yes, trains are more fuel and unloading land efficient. But if you've ever worked in/with warehouses, you'd know that how fast it takes to load/unload cargo, and how many workers you need for the job is a much, much more pressing consideration for warehouses than land use. Especially in places where land is cheap, like the USA.
@@beardedbarnstormer9577 there was Switzerland as example. I only watched this video idk about any other aspects but it showed warehouse with rail line and explanation of the government pushing for rail lines to warehouses. I'd assume it at least works if they are using it
@@almond5560 and how do train vs trucks compare in time to unload and workers needed?
jamaica has systematically worked to eliminate its rail network, at one point in history Jamaica boasted claims such as having the best rail system in the western hemisphere and now highways are the way that they chose for the direction of the country instead of high speed rail connections for freight and passengers, it is a sad day for rail here
I've been to Jamaica and had a guide with me and about 8 others in this old van driving around the island, up and down the hilly single-lane roads. It was not exactly relaxing and not smooth at all. That same trip, we went all around the island, if we just had smooth high speed rail to each of the main destinations and then could coordinate a taxi or something for the shorter distances within towns then we would have. It would have been so much nicer and safer. I still loved experiencing Jamaica. Beautiful island and people. Just wish the best for each land to be built better.
I just can't fathom why us Americans won't invest in railroads. The interior is largely flat plains; PERFECT for trains to run.
Because that would be MuH CoMmUnIsM, or some stupid-ass fucking argument like that
2:40 "Distracted driving kills" Thanks flashing sign.
They’d rather put those signs up than admit most people inherently don’t have the attributes needed to consistently drive safely and develop a rail centric transportation system.
All aboard the cargo train express!!! Great work as usual Alan. The one thing I wonder.. if those other warehouses are right near a train line, how the hell haven't they thought to call up the rail company all the other warehouses right down the road use and ask for a contract???
Because in order to ensure that goods arrive perfectly on time, Amazon has to purchase a section of track to give their trains absolute priority (which they won't do as doing such would be less attractive than trucks). See Ford's attempt to provide coal to his factory being stopped as he couldn't buy out the local railway.
Japan on passenger rail: (Swole Doge)
I am responsible for 72.7 percent of passenger-kilometers of travel
Japan on freight rail: (cheems)
Oh no, highways! Now I onlybring 5% of freight
Complicated. They have a shit ton of ship cargo just for transporting goods inside the country. Lots of goods are transported from port to port. They could use more light freight trains though and I agree
@@albertoandrade9807 yeah, on the large scale ships tend to be even more efficient than trains as water need even less maintenance than rails do 😏
Another reason to make Amazon pay their fair share of taxes, they put more wear and tear on roads that everyone else, same for Walmart.
Highway thickness is no accident. Another blatant case of planned obsolescence, lobbied and paid for a long time ago by [shocker] the biggest winners in every industry involved.
I get so pissed every time my drive through town in the summer. That's when they shut down 3/5 lanes to replace arbitrary sections of our main artery.
> average car
> 4000 lbs
Oh you 'muricans.
thats still 2 metric tons.
I like the flashing, colourful, distracting sign at 2:43 that says "distracted driving kills"
I found it very distracting. If i were driving there i wouldn't pay attention to the other cars, because there's a HUGE FLASHING SIGN so it must be something extremely urgent and important, and i need to know what it says ASAP (not exactly rational, but it's how the human mind works). Then i realize it says "distracted driving kills", then i think "Oh, distracted? Ironic, since i'm distracted right now."
Switzerland’s rail network is 100% electrified, except shipyards. Private and Sate-owned railway companies work under the same timetable conference. About 60 % of the network is nationalized since exactly 100 years.
To back up your point about class I railroads: Amazon wanted to pay Norfolk Southern to have their own dedicated intermodal train a year or two back and they pretty much told them to kick rocks
This is a very sound argument, i like trains :3 however, there will be many other challenges to do the switch. I live in a small town and the region is growing. There are going to be two new amazon warehouses being built and the county is excited for new and accessible jobs. Yet, I am not looking forward to the new traffic these trucks will make on the way to work in the big city >w< We have trains here but they only transport coal and other mined or energy products. Everytime i look at those trains I think... you can do more :')
This guy is like that one kid in school who is a god at presentations and nobody else in the district is better than him
“I do NOT want to take away your 2 day shipping.” That’s the problem; you should want to. If you want that item so quickly, go to a store and buy it instead of putting this much stress on the supply chain system.
The music and transfer slides really are the best on the web. Makes your vids top-tier
In a lot of countries the post office was run by (or at least associated with) the railways, and mail trains were common as they greatly decreased the time letters and parcels could be delivered. Sad that postage, along with freight, has been moved off trains to trucks
2:41 sign says "distracted driving kills" and still has the audacity to flicker like it's at a rave
I live in Ontario, a province that has seen probably 90% of it's track infrastructure torn up and built over. It's sad seeing all the small towns that once had many rail lines now having none. Just ghosts of what's left.
I heard from IRM that shipping vegetables by rail in the USA have made a slight comeback, specifically with potatoes! Due to the high weight of potatoes that trains can carry more of them in larger loads, and it helps that potatoes aren't highly time sensitive product.
"Let's say you live in Philadelphia, PA, and you order a new bike lock off of Amazon."
From this point on I assumed that we were talking about Justin Roczniak.
I'm not going to DuckDuckGo that. But I assume you mean the crazy Berkley teacher who cracked someone over the head with one while he was LARPing as a protester
@@gxlorp Nah, I'm referring to one of the hosts of the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. He lives in Philly, talks frequently about biking, and he and Alan move in the same circles, so they almost certainly know each other.
A fun fact is that Switzerland was the first country to use wide-spread electrification of railroads because it is way more reliable and less maintenance heavy than steam and diesel trains, especially on mountainous terrain
No Switzerland head a lot of electricity from hydroelectric power station and no domestic coal and oil. The another think is, Switzerland small and dense.
Honestly if anything about Amazon needs to change it's their return policy. While it's nice as a customer to benefit from their nearly no questions asked return policy. The fact they basically just throw it all away is a massive waste. There is no second hand market, no refurbishment. Even nearly untouched boxes get chucked into the a landfill because they don't want to spend the effort to look through it and check.
Also Amazon refused to donate any of it, because again they don't want to sort through it or have anything to do with it. Even a small warehouse my friend worked at threw away a good couple hundred pounds of stuff away a day. Stuff the management wouldn't even let them take home for fear of leading to theft of non returned items.
Here in brazil we are having the same problem, the bureaucracy is just too big(in fact we are one of the worst countrines to make business in the world) is impossible to build new railroads because only the governament can do, but, the governament also cant operate this railroads since only private companies can do that, so the politicians never do anything since they think they will not have profit from that, the truck problem here is so terrible that is common to see capsized trucks in the middle of the streets, a funny thing is that bureaucracy here is so big that the governament put new taxes in trucks, so we have less trucks now, but, they also but new taxes in trains, and they also prohibit small trucks(kei trucks) and bigger trains, literally a hell of logistics.
This is where I disagree with the premise that nationalized rail lines automatically mean progress. Mexico for example privatized their rail lines and investment and traffic on their railroads have increased greatly since (with the backdrop of NAFTA being created).