Bacon's Rebellion

U.S. 460 – the New Interstate 81?

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by

James A. Bacon
in

If you think truck traffic on Interstate 81 is bad, just wait to see what U.S. 460 and U.S. 58 look like in 25 years if Virginia Port Authority projections for truck traffic pan out. According to an article in today’s Daily Press, surging Asian imports through Virginia ports could triple the volume of warehouse and distribution space, about 10- to 15-million square feet now.

“My fear, as an engineer, is gridlock,” Mike Crist said. He’s an engineer with Moffatt & Nichol, the firm that has worked with the Port Authority to study the need for more distribution center space. Crist said the potential for trucks leaving distribution centers to hit gridlock at tunnels or interstate-highway bottlenecks should nudge developers to look westward – where trucks can make a cleaner getaway to U.S. 58 or 460.

Warehouse and distribution facilities pay lots and lots of taxes, so they’re a great benefit to the Commonwealth — at least as long as international trade patterns persist. However, it’s widely acknowledged that trucks are way undertaxed, given the pounding they put on pavements and the roadway maintenance demands they create. By all means, let us try to find a way to accommodate this economic bonanza, but let us find a way that doesn’t entail sticking the tax burden on the general public or accelerating the spread of dysfunctional human settlement patterns to outlying counties. Trucks need to pay their fair share of the multi-billion dollar improvements that will be needed.

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17 responses to “U.S. 460 – the New Interstate 81?”

  1. Jim Wamsley Avatar
    Jim Wamsley

    What percent of this traffic will move on rail using the Heartland Corridor?

    The federal transportation bill earmarked $90 million for use in developing the Heartland Corridor,a rail project that will effectively link The Port of Virginia with distribution markets in the Midwest.
    This project will provide a direct route to the major markets of Columbus and Chicago for double-stack container trains.
    The Heartland Corridor is designed to create a seamless, efficient intermodal rail route that will start at Portsmouth and Chesapeake, cross West Virginia and culminate in Columbus, Ohio. In Columbus, Heartland Corridor trains will link up with western rail networks and/or the existing Norfolk Southern network that is double-stack cleared to Chicago.

  2. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I heard the Governor say yesterday that they expect another million containers annually through Maersk and they might get up to 25 percent of that onto rail (now about 15 percent), but that leaves 750,000 additional container on the highway (2,000 a day).

    Rail just doesn’t have the reliability or handle the volume of a major highway. Period.

    I don’t think the trucking industry would agree they fail to pay their fair share, and nobody screamed louder when the Senate proposed to increase their fees. If there are to be major increases, they need to be national or regional or else Virginia’s neighbors will just siphon off the business.

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Use the surplus. Right? That will solve all our problems. We don’t have a transportation problem — my delegate told me so.

  4. James Atticus Bowden Avatar
    James Atticus Bowden

    Expand 460. Make the rail and road connection to the Port. Put a toll on both.

    Anon: Actually you can use part of the surplus for part of the start up money.

  5. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    There are solutions for truck traffic on US Route 406 and US Route 58.

    Jim Wamsley takes the first step re inter-New Urban Region agglomerations.

    However, because the Hampton Roads facilities serve multiple New Urban Regions and Urban Support Regions on this side of the Ohio Valley, any solution needs to be a multi-regional / multi-state solution.

    The states, regional transportation agencies and the railroads serving Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina need to get together and establish a network of New Urban Region-serving and Urban Support Region-serving “inland ports.” The vast majority of goods comes into Virginia in containers and should move to the regions-of-use in containers and those containers need to be on railcars.

    Each “inland port” needs to have a big enough site to accommodate region-serving distribution centers, individual and joint.

    The next step is a uniform, multi-state “heavy goods” weight distance tax on roadway use to pay the true full cost of heavy trucks. This will make functionally located regional distribution centers more economical and keep heavy trucks from breaking up the roadways.

    Anonymous 1:07 is right the truck owners lobby will scream. Since when in the Commonwealth set up to subsidize truck owners. Recall the basic reality: functional settlement patterns will only emerge when we fairly allocate location variable costs.

    We do not need any more Front Royal “inland ports” that just pump truck traffic onto I-81 and other Interstate Roadways headed for every New Urban Region east of the Mississippi.

    We also do not need each municipal economic development agency and the Commonwealth cutting deals subsidized, scattered distribution centers within ten miles of every Interstate interchange.

    Finally, every region needs to start an import replacement program. Getting the majority of all non-food consumer imports from China, or any other single source is unsustainable.

    EMR

  6. RedBull Avatar
    RedBull

    I blogged on a similar issue a few weeks ago.

    Check it out, here.

    If we had more inland ports it might remove some trucks from our roads.

  7. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    It is also unsustainable to pay ourselves higher prices to produce what we can buy cheaper elsewhere.

    Say we manufacture bolts to put in our cars, while Germany buys its bolts from China. Our cars will be incrementally noncompetitive with Germany based on the price of the bolts.

    My wife sells flowers, which we can grow on the farm. It is less expensive to have them grown in Columbia, put them on an airplane and have them flown here for her to sell. Therefore growing flowers here is unsustainable (at this level of production, and land and labor rates). I grow and sell hay, but I can buy better quality hay from Maryland and Alberta and have it trucked in for the same price I can grow it. Some local hay farmers have sold their equipment and are now only dealers, and hay is a very inefficient product to ship.

    If cost plus transportation for a distant product is less than the cost of a local product, then the local product is unsustainable, not the foreign one. (This applies to housing too, but the transportation factor is different.)

    If our product is labor then our labor rates are unsustainable in the face of Chinese rates that can produce similar goods. One way to look at it is that our full locational costs are too high. We are either going to have lower labor rates, or we are going to produce something they can’t. Some people would argue that our major export right now is war. In the context of millions of illegal aliens, the question is would we rather have them here working for us, or would we rather tosw them out and then compete against them ourselves?

    The truckers are going to scream bloody murder when we try to raise their rates, and they are well organized. They should pay more but they probably won’t. As soon as you have one chink in the argument that you should pay full locational costs, then that translates into less than perfectly functional settlement pattern. As each group strives to get lower costs, each effort translates into less and less perfect settlements, but with lower and lower overall costs.

    It is not a perfect world.

    I don’t know very much about it, but my guess is that intermodal rail doesn’t work very well for distances under 600 miles. You have to load and unload the train at each end at a dedicated facility, and you now need two trucks and two drivers instead of one (unless you can load the train right off the ship). Lighterage ( the cost of short haul trucking) is higher in cost and trains travel slower. So, if yoour load is worth $20,000 then time value of money says it is cheaper just to drive the truck and save the time.

    Plan on having lots of trucks on the roads, and making lots of road repairs. Put it in the budget.

    Have a nice day.

  8. Jim Wamsley Avatar
    Jim Wamsley

    Yes, Ray Hyde is correct. Intermodal rail doesn’t work very well for distances under 600 miles. For distances over a half day, you now need two trucks and two drivers because the drives exchange trailers at the half way point and return home on the last half of the trip. Trains travel slower or faster depending on the train. BNSF offers truck competitive travel times.

    Rays solution “Plan on having lots of trucks on the roads, and making lots of road repairs. Put it in the budget.” will be a budget breaker.

    A better solution is to get honest with the rail alternative. Don’t study a Virginia segment for the DEIS when the goods go over 600 miles. Consider the whole market, study the whole trip and figure out the least cost. Don’t expect the citizens to pay tolls so that trucks can undercut rail tariffs.

    The taxpayer should never be stuck with paying for someone who wants to build an empire. Until Virginia reforms transportation planning, any increase in funding will be throwing good money after bad.

  9. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    You are right of course Jim, I was being partly facetious. The better answer is to get honest with the rail alternative, and get the best out of it for what it can do well.

    I seem to recall some scheme for short distance intermodal transport to take some of the load off of I-81. I doubt that is wise. But even if we manage to get truckers to pay their share, it will be transferred to the cost of goods we buy: a tax increase is a tax increase.

    If you get rail to do what it can, you still wind up with more trucks on the road: at both ends of the rail head. Like I said to Jim Bacon, you can switch from beef to chicken, but with two million more people you need a lot more chickens.

    If fixing the roads sufficiently to haul the goods we all need is a budget buster, then what is the alternative? Doing without? If we spend the money to fix the roads, we can’t afford as much bourbon. If we don’t fix the roads we have no bourbon. We are screwed.

  10. Jim Wamsley Avatar
    Jim Wamsley

    If the demand is there, the same capital investment will move ten times the goods by rail as by highways. Highways are better when there is low demand and for the short trip.

  11. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    OK. The overall line haul speed for railroads in 99/00 was 23.7. By 04/05 it was down to 22.1, almost a 5% decrease in speed. That’s less than half of what a truck averages. So if the same capital investment moves ten times the freight, takes twice as long, and doesn’t reach the end point, because it still has to get on a truck then the capital investment argument doesn’t look quite so good. Especially since the time value of money is such a big driver on these high value shipments.

    I agree we should encourage the best use of railroads. I hate driving anywhere near a truck that outweighs me by what a hundred times? I really hate it if I think I’m paying part of his freight.

    But if we think railroads are only effective over six hundred miles then that more or less defines “short” trips as less than that. (Coincidentally, it’s pretty much cost ineffective to fly less than six hundred miles as well.)

    And when we encourage capital investment to suit our needs, we have to remember that it is not our capital.

    This is a really hard problem.

  12. James Young Avatar
    James Young

    Well, at least then the money (most extracted from Northern Virginia and spent elsewhere) spent on those beautiful, underutilized thoroughfares will have been justified.

  13. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Ouch.

  14. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    One aspect of the House plan I found interesting was the $45 million to upgrade rail lines from Front Royal to Manassas. The money will make it easier to ship goods to and from the Virginia Inland Port which is located in Warren County, close to I-81 and I-66.

    Red Bull: I’m sure the folks in Fauquier haven’t got wind of this, or figured out that upgrading the rail lines will also make commuter rail more possible.

    With those trains whistling at every barnyard crossing, it is noisy enough in pasrts of Northern Fauquier now. Endless trains day and night is going to be a lot of fun.

  15. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    Jim W:

    The 600 mile rule of thumb for container freight (along with the 250 mile rule of thumb for air vs high-speed ground and the other rules of thumb for commuter rail, etc.) are all based on the current set of subsidies.

    Subsideis of rail, interurbans and canals in the 19th centruy, of private rubber tierd vehicles since 1910 and airplanes since 1920 all need to be rethought.

    Level the playing field, charge the fair cost of location-variable goods and services and watch conventional wisdon change.

    What we need are functional settlement patterns and transport systems that provide mobility and access, not subsidies for the system that makes the most short term cash.

    EMR

  16. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Ed: show me the figures to support your argument.

    I believe trucks don’t pay their full costs, and if that “subsidy” was removed things would change. But railraods got such massive subsidies a hundred years ago, they are still sucking on that nipple. Lord knows what their present subsidies are.

    The 600 mile “rule” was justmy guess based on simple observation. If there is such a rule it is news to me, but it verifies my opinion.

    Load up a truck. Drive it fifty to a hundred miles to the rail yard. Hang around all day will the truck is loaded on the train and the train is asembled. Then amble around the countryside on a circuitous route beause trains don’t climb hills well, and make that trip at 23 miles per hour. Then hang around another day to unload the train and drive the truck another hundred or more miles to get to the final destination.

    Even if you take the truck subsidies away and keep the train subsidies, trucks are still faster and cheaper, except for special circumstances.

    And, they actually go wher youneed them to go.

    Your argument makes no sense whatsoever, and I still don’t understand what it is you, who claim to support the free market, have against short term cash.

  17. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    The fact that many trains only travel at 23 miles and hour is because of two reasons. 1) The government has set low speed limits on trains to help minimize the amount of dammage done in car train collisions, and 2) Because the railroads own, repair, and pay taxes on all of their track. Unlike the trucking industry where the federal and state governments pay for the upkeep of the highways with our tax money. Also I work for the largest trucking company in the nation and the argument that trucks are faster and cheaper is not true. We are constantly loading hundreds of trailers and containers a day on to trains to move them because it is cheaper to move them by rail than to pay several hundred drivers and the desiel to move all the trailers on the highway. Even if all subsidies where droped, tax levels adjusted to be equal, and the rate regulations dropped, it would still be cheaper to move fieght by rail over long distances. And by the way Trucking companies currently recieve more federal subsidies than railroads do. In fact most truck drivers wages are covered by the fuel subsidies that trucking companies recieve currently at over $0.50 cents a mile. And if you need proof take the time to look the subsidies up there all public knowledge and listed on the IRS website.

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