OTTAWA — As usual, there’s a mixture of truth and fiction in the Canadian Trucking Alliance’s response to my comments, writes Bill Rowat in the National Post. Mr. Rowat is President and CEO of the Railway Association of Canada. Unfortunately, the public can’t always easily distinguish between the truth and the fiction.
The recent federal budget focused on border security and streamlining cross-border freight traffic flows, in part because of the nature of the North American economy. The government rightly addressed the biggest problem area, i.e. trucking with its thousands of drivers and high turnover, thousands of individual shipments and thousands of truck movements every day. Rail required less attention on the security front because of its own investments in “best border practices,” including the creation of highly automated information exchange between the industry and customs agencies, its fewer employees and stable workforce, its safe, dedicated and controlled corridors and its own police force. Add to that rail’s ability to deliver advance information electronically, describing the contents of a 100-car intermodal train, for example, which is the equivalent of 280 tractor-trailers, and one can begin to appreciate why the rail mode is deemed less of a problem.
Rail objects to road investments, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance. In fact, rail objects to unbalanced public transportation policies that allow trucking to underprice its freight service by up to 50%, based on data from the last highway cost allocation study conducted in Canada (1991 Royal Commission on Passenger Transportation). Regarding the balance between car-truck road pricing, the wear and tear on roads and bridges of one big truck is the equivalent of 34,000 automobiles.
The trucking alliance pretends rail carries only bulk commodities. Resource companies who ship bulk commodities are very important railway customers, but rail also carries 90% of the auto industry’s output, 75% of inputs to the aluminum industry, 70% of the chemical industry’s production and 1.6-million containers and trailers that are not dependent on a rail siding for pickup or delivery. I could go on.
The trucking alliance waxes eloquent about a study done for, not by, the Commission on Environmental Co-operation, and suggests pollution would increase if traffic shifted from truck to rail. To set the record straight, this work draws heavily on unsubstantiated assumptions. For example, it assumes that truck nitrogen oxide and particulate matter emissions will improve 900% faster than train emissions, when experience shows similar technical improvements for both modes. It assumes significant reductions in truck nitrogen oxide levels despite doubling or quadrupling of truck traffic by 2020. The reality is that, despite emission reduction regulations on road diesel, nitrogen oxide emissions are up 60% since 1970 in the United States. It also assumes truck traffic can double or even quadruple without increasing emissions, due to congestion. Yet the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development points out expanding highway capacity is rarely a sustainable solution. Rather, it adds to the problem. The study assumes that allowing bigger and heavier trucks will reduce emissions and the number of trucks on the road, when, in fact, experience shows that bigger trucks expand trucking capacity and lead to more trucking demand and activity.
An unbiased study? Hardly! Rail is five times more fuel-efficient than trucking because of the low friction of steel wheel on steel rail, compared with rubber on asphalt, and the ability to couple cars together into a train. All other discussion about alleged benefits of different truck diesel engine configurations, under laboratory conditions, cannot alter rail’s intrinsic benefit.
The trucking alliance says unless shippers abandon their current production and distribution strategies, trucks are here to stay. The railway association has never argued there’s no place for trucks. In fact, we believe there’s a place for both truck and train, and that it will become evident to policy planners as road congestion and pollution increase and as land availability for more and more roads shrinks.
(Bill Rowat is President and CEO of the Railway Association of Canada.)