China opens 11,000km of Motorway
Discussion
trashbat said:
Super Slo Mo said:
I wondered when someone would mention freight. There are two flaws with the rail freight model, one is that, as said, you still need trucks to shift stuff from depots to where it's needed, bearing in mind that most of the goods carried by road are destined for shops or consumer delivery. The other is that taking trucks off the road will only have a minimal effect on congestion, due simply to the massive disparity in numbers of cars compared to trucks.
Someone fairly recently (Tesco? or maybe Stobart?) experimented with moving their backbone from road to rail, using railheads and local transit via road. It didn't work for them and was abandoned, but the fact that it was ever considered viable suggests that it is achievable.I think the momentum of the existing road-oriented configuration is a deterrent for a start. If you standardised and modularised everything all along the chain then it might be a lot more attractive. Shipping containers already do this and work well until they get too local; in a different context, airborne baggage routing is another logistical problem that we are pretty good at. However the costs to get there would probably be enormous.
However they did deliver 4 times the amount via train and said they usual used them on the longer runs were they facilities to unload directly onto stobart trucks, so it is used in some places, not all though.
trashbat said:
If you then placed people near work and leisure and incentivised localism then the number (elimination) and total distance of journeys would again be reduced.
How will that work?Most towns are, effectively, to varying degrees, dormitarys for the surrounding cities. Then you also have the age old rub of why/how would the 'local' financier want to live within yards of the local bin man, let alone the local double glazing salesman, and you don;t even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
Progress is mobility; economic and social.
Digga said:
ow will that work?
Most towns are, effectively, to varying degrees, dormitarys for the surrounding cities. Then you also have the age old rub of why/how would the 'local' financier want to live within yards of the local bin man, let alone the local double glazing salesman, and you don;t even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
Progress is mobility; economic and social.
Intelligent mobility is progress. Having to move because of famine or drought or disease might be a kind of mobility, but it's not one you'd vote for.Most towns are, effectively, to varying degrees, dormitarys for the surrounding cities. Then you also have the age old rub of why/how would the 'local' financier want to live within yards of the local bin man, let alone the local double glazing salesman, and you don;t even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
Progress is mobility; economic and social.
Duplicating the American suburban scene of out of town shopping centres and everything in your life being literally unreachable without a private car is a kind of progress I guess, but again it's not what I'd choose.
trashbat said:
Digga said:
ow will that work?
Most towns are, effectively, to varying degrees, dormitarys for the surrounding cities. Then you also have the age old rub of why/how would the 'local' financier want to live within yards of the local bin man, let alone the local double glazing salesman, and you don;t even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
Progress is mobility; economic and social.
Intelligent mobility is progress. Having to move because of famine or drought or disease might be a kind of mobility, but it's not one you'd vote for.Most towns are, effectively, to varying degrees, dormitarys for the surrounding cities. Then you also have the age old rub of why/how would the 'local' financier want to live within yards of the local bin man, let alone the local double glazing salesman, and you don;t even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
Progress is mobility; economic and social.
Duplicating the American suburban scene of out of town shopping centres and everything in your life being literally unreachable without a private car is a kind of progress I guess, but again it's not what I'd choose.
Whaetever, one of the best ways to share wealth between regions is to enable commuting of people and services.
Du1point8 said:
trashbat said:
Super Slo Mo said:
I wondered when someone would mention freight. There are two flaws with the rail freight model, one is that, as said, you still need trucks to shift stuff from depots to where it's needed, bearing in mind that most of the goods carried by road are destined for shops or consumer delivery. The other is that taking trucks off the road will only have a minimal effect on congestion, due simply to the massive disparity in numbers of cars compared to trucks.
Someone fairly recently (Tesco? or maybe Stobart?) experimented with moving their backbone from road to rail, using railheads and local transit via road. It didn't work for them and was abandoned, but the fact that it was ever considered viable suggests that it is achievable.I think the momentum of the existing road-oriented configuration is a deterrent for a start. If you standardised and modularised everything all along the chain then it might be a lot more attractive. Shipping containers already do this and work well until they get too local; in a different context, airborne baggage routing is another logistical problem that we are pretty good at. However the costs to get there would probably be enormous.
However they did deliver 4 times the amount via train and said they usual used them on the longer runs were they facilities to unload directly onto stobart trucks, so it is used in some places, not all though.
Even if it was achieved, and we got all 420,000 trucks off the road, the effect on congestion would be minimal. As there isn't the capacity on the railways as it is to cope with existing passenger requirements, tying that capacity up with freight just means that there would be hundreds of thousands more car journeys required instead.
Even if by some miracle we managed to have no effect on passenger numbers, and still get all the road freight onto the railways (although it'll never happen, as we still need store delivery by truck), there are still a massive number of cars clogging up our roads.
The solution needs to be more focussed on reducing car journeys, even if we could somehow modularise that and incorporate the car as part of the train journey by piggybacking it onto the train.
I will probably go down in flames for this, but 100% of the congestion on the UK roads is caused by poor lane discipline and poor driving skills.
Go to most places in Europe and most people use the inside lane and come out of the inside lane to overtake, before returning to it.
In the UK very few use the inside lane and prefer to sit in the middle lane, therefore making the outside lane more congested, when often there is nothing on the inside lane. Then you have those that sit in the outside lane doing 70mph when they could be in one of the other lanes, again holding up traffic.
Sort that out and then the congestion will vanish.
Go to most places in Europe and most people use the inside lane and come out of the inside lane to overtake, before returning to it.
In the UK very few use the inside lane and prefer to sit in the middle lane, therefore making the outside lane more congested, when often there is nothing on the inside lane. Then you have those that sit in the outside lane doing 70mph when they could be in one of the other lanes, again holding up traffic.
Sort that out and then the congestion will vanish.
Du1point8 said:
I will probably go down in flames for this, but 100% of the congestion on the UK roads is caused by poor lane discipline and poor driving skills.
On every instance I've used the motorways in the last few months, I'd say the majority of congestion is purely down to capacity.Yes there are middle-laners, but TBH, when there are so many HGVs (which we also foolishly allow into lane 2 with few restrictions) and junctions are so frequent, I question whether they make all that much difference at peak times. Granted when there is little traffic and also granted that outside lane hoggers are Satan's own.
Digga said:
Du1point8 said:
I will probably go down in flames for this, but 100% of the congestion on the UK roads is caused by poor lane discipline and poor driving skills.
On every instance I've used the motorways in the last few months, I'd say the majority of congestion is purely down to capacity.Yes there are middle-laners, but TBH, when there are so many HGVs (which we also foolishly allow into lane 2 with few restrictions) and junctions are so frequent, I question whether they make all that much difference at peak times. Granted when there is little traffic and also granted that outside lane hoggers are Satan's own.
There aren't that many HGV's anyway, I don't think the overall number of them on the roads has changed in about 40 years. There are, however, more than 70 cars to each single truck, obviously not necessarily all on the road at the same time.
Super Slo Mo said:
There aren't that many HGV's anyway, I don't think the overall number of them on the roads has changed in about 40 years.
Misleading, as you need to look at what constuituted the designation 'HGV' 40 years ago. At that time 180hp was something to shout about on a tractor unit. Today that'd barely pass muster for top-end 7.5 tonners, let alone artic tractor units where 400hp is pretty run-of-the-mill.Digga said:
Super Slo Mo said:
There aren't that many HGV's anyway, I don't think the overall number of them on the roads has changed in about 40 years.
Misleading, as you need to look at what constuituted the designation 'HGV' 40 years ago. At that time 180hp was something to shout about on a tractor unit. Today that'd barely pass muster for top-end 7.5 tonners, let alone artic tractor units where 400hp is pretty run-of-the-mill.Digga said:
Super Slo Mo said:
There aren't that many HGV's anyway, I don't think the overall number of them on the roads has changed in about 40 years.
Misleading, as you need to look at what constuituted the designation 'HGV' 40 years ago. At that time 180hp was something to shout about on a tractor unit. Today that'd barely pass muster for top-end 7.5 tonners, let alone artic tractor units where 400hp is pretty run-of-the-mill.trashbat said:
hy not? If you did rail properly rather than upgrading legacy 19th century infrastructure, a lot of HGVs would be gone or their journeys reduced to the sections that rail didn't reach (better ways to complete). Ditto public transport and non-car travel. If you then placed people near work and leisure and incentivised localism then the number (elimination) and total distance of journeys would again be reduced.
Don't get me wrong: this is undoubtedly full on, deity-like meddling that doesn't have a literal application now that we are stuck as we are, but I do think it would do what I claimed.
The railways won't be near enough to where the goods need to go unless you build a station for virtually every premises, but as you move towards doing that you reduce the ability for railway networks to take efficient routes anything beyond the most immediate destinations. So you still need a lorry and once you're at that point it's almost certainly more efficient for the lorry to just drive to its destination than go out of it's way to a railway station, unload, have a wait for a train, load the goods on, have someone wait for the goods to arrive at the other end, load and then unload again at the destination. I'm sure if you scale up the amount to well beyond what a single lorry can take and you can place the station near both ends it shifts towards the train, but I don't think that's a common use case.Don't get me wrong: this is undoubtedly full on, deity-like meddling that doesn't have a literal application now that we are stuck as we are, but I do think it would do what I claimed.
As for putting people near work... what if they change jobs, do you put anyone in any job, do you force people into communist blocks of fixed size apartments so you can swap people in and out as they need to move around, what about people that work with multiple companies, couples that work at different companies... it's a mess and I don't think it works at scale. If it did work I'm sure our blood vessel infrastructure would be very different.
Edited by 0000 on Thursday 3rd January 15:17
The railway system for industry worked great back when there were no roads or only single lane tracks. There are a surprising number of villages and towns around the UK that sprang up simply because the railway crossed a canal at some point, which was the ideal point to swap cargo to best get to the destination.
Nobody built a factory ten miles from a canal or railroad 150 years ago.
Nobody built a factory ten miles from a canal or railroad 150 years ago.
0000 said:
The railways won't be near enough to where the goods need to go unless you build a station for virtually every premises, but as you move towards doing that you reduce the ability for railway networks to take efficient routes anything beyond the most immediate destinations. So you still need a lorry and once you're at that point it's almost certainly more efficient for the lorry to just drive to its destination than go out of it's way to a railway station, unload, have a wait for a train, load the goods on, have someone wait for the goods to arrive at the other end, load and then unload again at the destination. I'm sure if you scale up the amount to well beyond what a single lorry can take and you can place the station near both ends it shifts towards the train, but I don't think that's a common use case.
Indeed. But if you were somehow made responsible for all freight and passenger movement within the UK, and tasked with optimising it, there is plenty you could do. In this worldview, An unladen lorry going anywhere is a sin, as are two half-laden trucks making almost identical journeys. So is a car with an empty seat. If you aggregate such stuff efficiently, you achieve economies. Can you satisfy all needs? Maybe not, but who says you need to.It comes back to how we are currently set up to operate. If you are (for example) McDonalds and your logistics are geared towards few central distribution depots and your own 44 ton artic calling at every local outlet in the area, then you're quite right. Is that sensible and socially optimal? I don't know.
0000 said:
As for putting people near work... what if they change jobs, do you put anyone in any job, do you force people into communist blocks of fixed size apartments so you can swap people in and out as they need to move around, what about people that work with multiple companies, couples that work at different companies... it's a mess and I don't think it works at scale. If it did work I'm sure our blood vessel infrastructure would be very different.
As I said earlier, I think it comes down to supply and demand. The transport network works reasonably well and enables people to make life decisions (home, work etc) that would once have been odd and again are questionable when viewed in terms of the population - congestion, environment etc. As King Herald above said, it used to be that people and workplaces were situated for transport links. Now those links are universal so are sited wherever. Is that a good thing? In some ways certainly yes. But if you started again with an overarching goal, could you make it better?You can disincentivise this stuff if you don't want it; for example, tax employers based on their employee's commute distance. Not suggesting we should, but options are available short of building more roads.
Super Slo Mo said:
Digga said:
Super Slo Mo said:
There aren't that many HGV's anyway, I don't think the overall number of them on the roads has changed in about 40 years.
Misleading, as you need to look at what constuituted the designation 'HGV' 40 years ago. At that time 180hp was something to shout about on a tractor unit. Today that'd barely pass muster for top-end 7.5 tonners, let alone artic tractor units where 400hp is pretty run-of-the-mill.DofT said:
Since the late-1980s, more than 60 per cent of goods moved have been transported by road. The amount travelling this way rose to 151 billion tonne kilometres in 2010 from 137 billion tonne kilometres in 2009, an increase of 10 per cent
ETA if you dig into stats provided, the road freight moved (in billion tonne kilometres) rose from 85 in 1970, to 151 in 2010, which is the latest year data is available for.And in the same period, rail freight fell from 25 to 19!
Edited by Digga on Thursday 3rd January 16:12
trashbat said:
You can disincentivise this stuff if you don't want it; for example, tax employers based on their employee's commute distance. Not suggesting we should, but options are available short of building more roads.
There are a wealth of options available as alternatives to building more roads. The problem is that none of the ones being put forward address a better transport solution than roads.0000 said:
There are a wealth of options available as alternatives to building more roads. The problem is that none of them address a better transport solution than roads.
Well, quite... but if we're only considering mobility, there are few better transport solutions than tarmac'ing the entire inhabited country, but I wouldn't want to live there.I don't just mean mobility. I'd say the same for economic viability and time efficiency. One of which at least suggests tarmac everywhere is less than ideal.
That there aren't many options better than road networks doesn't mean I think we should put every penny into them. But I'm loathe to see it subsidise other forms of transport that are less viable. I'd see what these guys could do in the UK first, for absolute peanuts in comparison.
That there aren't many options better than road networks doesn't mean I think we should put every penny into them. But I'm loathe to see it subsidise other forms of transport that are less viable. I'd see what these guys could do in the UK first, for absolute peanuts in comparison.
Du1point8 said:
I will probably go down in flames for this, but 100% of the congestion on the UK roads is caused by poor lane discipline and poor driving skills.
Go to most places in Europe and most people use the inside lane and come out of the inside lane to overtake, before returning to it.
In the UK very few use the inside lane and prefer to sit in the middle lane, therefore making the outside lane more congested, when often there is nothing on the inside lane. Then you have those that sit in the outside lane doing 70mph when they could be in one of the other lanes, again holding up traffic.
Sort that out and then the congestion will vanish.
I'd say 75% of hold ups on what should be free flowing roads is due to this. There are times when the road is too full to flow better but it is mostly just dumbarses blocking the outer lanes because they can't drive that cause the traffic to slow up.Go to most places in Europe and most people use the inside lane and come out of the inside lane to overtake, before returning to it.
In the UK very few use the inside lane and prefer to sit in the middle lane, therefore making the outside lane more congested, when often there is nothing on the inside lane. Then you have those that sit in the outside lane doing 70mph when they could be in one of the other lanes, again holding up traffic.
Sort that out and then the congestion will vanish.
On the subject of rail freight, does anyone know how much of the pre-Beeching network still exists, in the sense the routes are still intact and could be at least partially reused? Also, do coastal shipping and inland waterways have a role? How much road/rail/sidings capacity is taken up with slow moving non-perishable goods that could be diverted to an inland water network? In the age of Congestion Charging and Low Emission Zones, could canals become a viable means of getting certain goods into large cities again?
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