This morning I drove my brother-in-law to the airport in Boston. Two factors stood out: first, the number of trucks on the Massachusetts Turnpike has sharply increased since the recession of the early 1190s; and second, the new tunnels from Boston itself to the airport, one of the features of the `Big Dig', do make the journey much easier.
I noticed the sharp increase in trucks in the mid-1990s. I have not bothered to check for statistics on them, but have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, that there are a great many trucks than before. I suspect that in the old days, railroad trains carried a larger portion of the freight to and from Boston. More recently, trucks carry more.
Not quite thirty years ago, I was told by a local Massachusetts Department of Public Works person that trucks caused far more damage to roads than you might think. Channeled through a non-linear physical relationship, the extra weight and pressure of a loaded trailer on the road causes more than 6000 times the wear than a regular sedan.
He said that the Department of Public Works had to repair roads because of bad weather and age, but that cars hardly damaged a road at all. However, trucks did. One truck among 600 cars caused as much damage as ten cars. When trucks became too high a portion of the total number of vehicles, his maintenance crews had to resurface a road more often than age or weather would dictate.
I do not know whether these numbers are right or wrong. Certainly, I believed them at the time; indeed, I was so struck by them that I have remembered them ever since. But I have not followed up since I have not been involved in transportation since then.
What bothers me is that no journalist or politician that I have heard has jumped on the issue. (Many may have; but I have not heard of them.) My sense is that the damaging effect of trucks, presuming this claim is true, is so much more than anyone would expect that it simply has not entered main stream discourse. I would expect each truck to have ten or twenty times the aging effect on roads than a car, or maybe even forty times; but not more than a thousand times. The effect, if true, is an example of non-linearity.
The second part of my musings came before I entered the new Boston tunnels that so simplified my trip. (Well, the tunnels may not be so new to locals, but they are new to me). Cars and trucks run on gasoline and diesel fuel. It is refined from fossil oil. Not enough natural biomass can be grown to make an equivalent amount. Moreover, oil is fungible; oil from one part of the world can substitute for old from somewhere else.
In addition, people only use the oil they need. They do not use more than they need. Nor do they use less. Indeed, in the short run, people find it hard to use less. If you drive a truck every day from one factory to another, it is hard to reduce your fuel use in the short run, except, to a small degree, by driving slower. (An economist would say that `oil has a steep demand curve'.)
Consequently, if oil production drops in one place, not only is the shortage felt all over, it leads to considerably higher prices. The increase in price is more than proportional to the drop in production.
Clearly for the first few months of an oil shortage, inventories and government reserve stocks can be used as buffers. There need not be any reduction in the supply of gasoline and diesel fuel to cars and trucks. Similarly, given enough time, people will move to houses on rail lines and factories will shift to rail freight. But neither of these options can occur quickly. There is a fraught period after buffer stocks are used, and before alternatives become practical, when transport becomes expensive.
I worry lest this happen, either through natural causes or through military action. (As for military action: I fear that railroads will be targets, too; and that people will not want to shift to them.)
Put simply, the current ways of running our economy have succeeded over the past several generations but look fragile.
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