The finger thing means the taxes. Rail freight can't deliver the speed at a cost that trucks can't under cut. I suspect reliability increases costs exponentially, but only grows revenue linearly.
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that's not been the experience of the freight operations which try it! scheduled railroading works, it just so happens that the *specific incentive structure* of US freight carriers isn't good for ops stability
The more they do the stuff that people hate, the more the dividends go up. NS is working to make its carload business more reliable, but the changes don't seem to involve the surplus capacity that used to keep passenger trains running on schedule.
tl;dr operating ratio brain pushes managers to value cost minimization over any rational ROI calculation. This has been a problem for railroads for well over 120 years.
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https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/efficiency-and-the-decline-of-american-freight-railroads/
https://soundcloud.com/user-125862828/commercial-and-operational-strategies-for-class-i-volume-growth-with-farrukh-bezar