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A comment on The threat of technological unemployment. Parent comment

Re:The threat of technological unemployment by WalterBright on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @03:01PM (#13265767)
Long haul trucking should have never happened - that traffic belongs on railroads. LHT exists only because the highways are subsidized by the car traffic, whereas freight rail has to pay for the tracks.

Semi trailers should be loaded onto flatcars, trained to the destination city, and picked up and dropped on a truck for the intra-city delivery.

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Re:The threat of technological unemployment by ThrustVectoring on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @01:15AM (#13268792)
You're kind of missing the tradeoffs involved in long haul trucking vs rail. Even with highway subsidies involved, trucking is significantly more expensive than rail is. Like, brief google-fu puts 2007 rates at 16.54 cents per ton-mile for trucking, vs 2.99 for rail -- so, roughly speaking, LHT is over five times as expensive as rail is.

Given that folks are paying for LHT, it's important to figure out why. And the answer lies in just-in-time production and pull-based production systems. These systems put a large business value on the timeliness and flexibility of delivery. For many processes, saving $150/ton or so on transport doesn't matter if it means putting another day's worth of inventory into your production system, especially if if it risks producing the wrong stuff.

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