What About Freight?

One of the main justifications for building freeways today is through the need to ensure a better deal for freight. Trucks and people don’t mix well so there is a political and economic rationale to move them onto big roads away from people. Thus freeways, are being built around cities, mostly, rather than through them as they are much harder to get support for now.

There is a need for freight to be given consideration in the plans of cities and regions as trucks are an essential part of all freight systems; there is no city that has made a technology for moving goods within a city other than by truck. And sometimes a circumferential route around a city can help as it tries to create a more sustainable future for its people-oriented functions in centers. The Dutch ABC system tries to sort out how to do this by ensuring people-intensive activities are served by transit and not freeways while freight-intensive activities involving few people are served by good roads. Other policy directions that can help with freight in a post peak oil economy include:

1. Ensuring that freight has priority over passenger vehicles in access to fuel in the period when declines in availability begin to push prices rapidly up. Freight cities like Portland in the US use diesel at about 20% of the total fuel used in the city, whereas in Frankfurt it is over 50% and in the Asian cities it is nearly equal in proportion to gasoline (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999). These latter cities use a lot of diesel in their bus fleet as well as their trucks but in both cases there is a need to enable these functions to have priority over the gasoline using automobile users who have other options.
2. Increasingly there is a need for freight to be switched to rail. Long distance freight is much more efficient on rail and now that rail has cast off its old work practices it is highly economic as well. However the infrastructure for rail freight needs renewing and extending as with passenger transit. Most cities have goals now to increase the proportion of freight on rail from ports and other high intensity sites. Sydney is moving from 20% to 40% and the Virginia coast around Norfolk is moving from 25% to 35% based on a $200 million upgrade of track. Other functions can also be switched to rail in the freight task. Higher oil prices will make those cities and regions that have upgraded their alternatives to trucks much better off.
3. There is a land use element as well as a ‘tracks vs roads’ element in freight just as in passenger transport. To enable rail to work you need centers or nodes. For freight this means intermodal terminals that can enable economies of scale to be created. Inland ports and interchange points can enable freight to be switched to rail.
4. There is a way of reducing trucks that uses clever programming of deliveries. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) or freight logistics can halve the use of freight vehicles saving both oil and money.
5. Most importantly the growth in freight in general cannot be seen as in any way sustainable. Projections for freight by truck lobbies, ports, airports and even rail companies, sees freight doubling every ten years or even less. This has happened in previous decades but it cannot keep doubling. No road and rail system, no port and no airport, can cope with the kind of numbers that are being projected. This growth has been built on the assumption of cheap oil as the cost of transport in goods has become so small it is almost hardly a factor in decisions to export or import. Peak oil will change that. Cities and regions will need to adjust to having less growth in the goods that are imported or exported from their regions, unless they can be simply delivered by rail or ship (by far the most fuel efficient modes). There will also be a need for a less consumptive society in general thus also reducing the need for freight[i].