In this past week I have commuted to my employer’s headquarters twice and was shocked yet again in 2018 on how bad the highways were in terms of potholes and bridge expansion joints still impacted from the previous winter. I mean, come on, it is the end of July and there seems to be a huge delay in government getting their act together for the necessary maintenance and repairs. I have come to expect this in states that seem to always struggle with its infrastructure like Michigan and Illinois but this was in a high growth area near Indianapolis, IN.
Five and ten years ago it seemed that Indiana always not only maintained their roads the best in the Midwest, but also was able to upgrade the highway system. However, for whatever reason it is becoming evident that the wheels might be coming off the complex federal/state/county/municipality bureaucracy, and before you know it we will have another round of precipitation and freezing temperatures that will work its way into all the highway cracks and do even more damage this winter.
From the Cato Institute is an article that suggest some possible reversals that might take the weight (literally) off this aging infrastructure by using once again our waterway systems in this country to facilitate freight transportation. Seems that in researching why waterways were not prioritized in the last half century or so the author came up with a piece of government regulation that seems to have stifled any entrepreneurship of this option:
Passed in 1920, this law mandates that ships transporting cargo between two points in the United States be domestically flagged, owned, crewed, and built. Intended to bolster the U.S. maritime sector, the Jones Act has instead been a case study in the failures of protectionism. Absent foreign competition, U.S. shipbuilders produce vessels whose price is as much as eight times higher than those built abroad. This disincentive to the purchase of new vessels means we have fewer ships and a fleet that is old and inefficient.
High costs have inevitably followed and, along with them, increased demand for transportation alternatives such as trucking and rail.
Again, government interference in the market means distortions that might benefit some industries for a time but long term causes ineffective options for the customers (personal and business) that utilize any transportation system domestically. The proof of this is below:
From 1960 to 2014, the amount of freight placed on railroads increased by 48 percent while intercity trucks saw their loads grow by an impressive 217 percent. In sharp contrast, the amount of cargo carried by ships sailing around the coasts during this period decreased by 44 percent. And Great Lakes shipping declined by 43 percent.
Obviously, the government is inept at keeping the transportation infrastructure up to code (let alone, up to speed) as a monopoly always provides substandard service. The shift to waterways also will cause many to suspect environmental abuses from entrepreneurial endeavors that don’t have government oversight (even though our own government, especially the DoD is the largest polluter on the planet). I think that some Dutch expertise could be sought out as they have had plenty of experience of dealing with waterways WHILE balancing ecological impacts with automated systems for loading and off-loading:
A Dutch consortium of nearly 20 partners launched a project this month to study and demonstrate the technical possibilities for autonomous shipping, in the framework of the Smart Shipping Challenge 2017.
While there are attempts at innovation in the waterways of the US, the leader of this can not be the status-quo based government that is usually ony worried about their “cut” (revenue) instead of providing the market with some technological solutions that not only improve efficiencies but actually disrupt the market enough with some brilliant technologies that drop the cost of transport while being sensitive to the environment.
This can be done
SF1