Dedicated Transport Routes

Podcast Episode: 0253
How can we move products more efficiently?

​         Could dedicated transportation routes transform our highways and revolutionize industries? Let's unravel the history behind our congested highway systems, originally built for the seamless movement of goods but now throttled by personal vehicles. Drawing inspiration from the song "Convoy," we discuss 

​alternatives that could cut through the chaos—imagine lanes exclusively for transport trucks, vastly improving efficiency in traffic-heavy cities like Toronto. We reflect on the legacy of the United States Interstate System, the Trans-Canada Highway, and the potential benefits of separating the paths of goods and personal vehicles.

        “Cause we got a little old convoy rocking through the night. Yeah, we got a little old convoy, ain't she beautiful sight, convooooooyy” yeah, that's actually from a movie not just Homer Simpson singing it when he actually got Bart that microphone for his birthday, though it was very hilarious and we all loved it. That's actually from a movie back in the day called Convoy. Seen it A little different. It is a car cult movie. It's one of those ones I got to add to the list of. I have seen it, but that song has more meaning to our podcast today.
 
       Today we're taking a look at transportation infrastructure, and how would it be if we improved the way we move products and transports? I'm not talking about transporting goods on trains or boats or planes. I'm talking about creating dedicated transportation routes. We kind of already have them, but I'm talking about ones that are specifically set up only for the transportations of goods, not people, just goods. So today AutoLooks is going to be taking a look at dedicated transportation routes.
 
       Welcome back to the AutoLooks podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by check it out. Read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings. Go to the links website page. Big or small, we have them all. Car companies from around the globe, all available on one continuous website that is AutoLooks.net. And at the end of the year, always check out our top-rated vehicles, as we love to rate vehicles on their exterior designs and tell you what really works in this world and give at least one vehicle that covered A-plus award of design excellence every year, available on the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net.
 
       So, like I said in the beginning, dedicated transport routes. Why would we even consider these? Like? Essentially, I thought that's why highways were made, especially the interstate to the United States. Well, that was one main purpose of them. They created the highways in the United States, the interstate system, essentially for the ease and access of transportable goods. Realizing that more goods were getting moved across their country on transports and not trains, they decided to set a whole brand-new highway system. Now, as I've already talked about in my home country, Canada, oh yeah, we created a highway system. It just took until the mid-60s before it was finally finished and by the time it was finally finished it was still out of date. So, we still don't give transportation network the much-do that it needs. A lot of other places in the world have they created either the two plus one lane, the dedicated transportation route, which we call the limited access highways, or freeways or expressways. 

        If you ever noticed, all standard freeways and major highways in cities all go right through the main industrial parks why? Well, if you ever played any of those old transport games the late 90s, early 2000s, like 18-wheeler pro trucker, was any of those old transport games of the late 90s, early 2000s, like 18-wheeler pro trucker, was one of those ones. That was an arcade game. Have you ever noticed you always pick stuff up in one industrial park and drop it off in another industrial park. Well, when you're moving goods across great distances, that's where it moved. It's only from those suburban industrial parks does product move into the city that we need to utilize city streets Between cities.
 
        We essentially needed a dedicated transport route. We had that. We gave the world the interstate system in the United States. We have the M1 in Great Britain, we have the TransCanada in Canada, we got major automotive networks to connect all of our major cities and it's the free flow on these limited access highways that made transportation of goods a lot quicker and a lot better. Because when they were traveling along those old two-lane highways that went through towns, they had to slow down, they weren't as straight, they got closed down, quite often due to bad weather or accidents. But as the world grew from the 1950s all the way up until the 90s, and our population exploded past what we had ever seen on this planet before Well, at least what we know of are highways. That dedicated transportation route to move our goods from city to city got clogged and filled with personal transportation units.
 
          Now you may think I'm kind of crazy, because I'm one of those people that always talks about expanding our limited access highway system, especially in home country. But there's a reasoning behind that. I'm not thinking about the safety of everyone else around me. Sure, I would love to drive a limited access highway all the way from my city down to the next major center, which is over four hours away, be able to do between 100 and 120 kilometers an hour. Americanize these 65 to 75 miles an hour. Get in between the two cities. Yeah, it'd be safer. I could just basically set my cruise control and go straight down. But even if that was in play, I would still have problems with traffic. The second I get within one hour of that major center. Why? Because there's so many personal transportation routes utilizing that dedicated transport route. So, in a sense, these dedicated transport routes already existed. We just clogged it up with our personal mobility units. That automobile that's sitting in your driveway is your own personal mobility unit and essentially by you using the freeway to get to work because it's faster and quicker, you're clogging up transportation of goods from city to city and as those goods take longer and longer to get from place to place, it costs you more. Just in the city of Toronto, they can lose $100 million per month just because of transports getting stuck on their highways. If those highways moved at a steady rate of at least 80 kilometers an hour, or 100, like that's posted, those goods would move quicker, thus decreasing our overhead. But why am I getting into these dedicated transport routes? 

        Back in the 1990s, the east coast of Canada was going through a major expansion. Now in Canada we have what we call equalization payments. They're made in Canada to kind of make it so that the half-provinces can help keep the half-not-provinces having the same systems in play. So mostly British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and even Ontario pay these equalization payments out to everyone else. The East Coast has been getting them for years due to the fact that it had a dwindling population, its industries were going under and it needed help. Well, what they did in the 90s is they realized they needed to expand their transportation network. You can't set up manufacturing sites on basic two-lane highway systems that barely have any access roads around them. You need to create a dedicated transportation network, essentially an interstate system. So, the provinces of New Brunswick, nova Scotia and even Newfoundland set out to create these new dedicated highway systems.
 
        If you actually take a look at a map from above, there are actual dedicated transport routes now in both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Newfoundland has them in some areas, but not fully limited access or a dedicated highway system. Nova Scotia kind of has it around the bottom end of the peninsula. They have their original highways and they've created a new two dedicated, limited access thruway for the transportation of goods and services. It's also to transport people from city to city more quickly, but because it's close to the original highway that existed. Anybody traveling out there doesn't need to use this highway. If they want to see the countryside as it is, they could travel along the standard highway system, the pre-existing main highway, and slowly coast through all these towns, like you do when you're on vacation.
 
      But when I take vacation in Northern Ontario, my main area I live in, I can only take the transportation routes. The Trans-Canada Highway is the only way to go. There are no other alternatives. So, for me, when something happens on that, that's it. It's game over. Transportation comes to a standstill. But why is it still set up that way? Why do we not have a secondary highway dedicated to just the movement of goods? Especially at a time that Canada is looking to reduce its dependence on the United States thanks to all its tariffs? We want to trade amongst all the provinces. To do this we need a dedicated transportation network. Our highway systems won't cut it and a lot of provinces and a lot of places don't have these dedicated transportation networks. If something happens on one highway, that's it. Like I said, it's game over. But by creating a secondary dedicated transport route from all these main hubs and only allowing transportation infrastructure to ride on those roadways, we can decrease our costs.
 
       I've had this happen to me tons of times order stuff for a job and it's supposed to be in tomorrow, and all of a sudden there's a snowstorm overnight and the transport gets stuck in the highway for six hours. Usually, you don't find out about this until you get into work the next morning, when there's already people on site waiting for this product to arrive. Then you have to call them, tell them to get off site because the truck's not going to be there until the next day because it's backlogged on the highway. Well, what did that just do? One? The transportation company is at a total loss because they lose an entire shift with that truck sitting there that they have to pay for. I now have to pay for my workers sitting there at a job site. Even if they'd only been there for 30 minutes, I still have to pay them the base minimum three hours in the province of Ontario. So, I got to pay them three hours for work that they didn't even do. So, I'm out money, the transportation company's out money, and the transportation company has to find a way to make that money back and, knowing this, they usually have higher rates and we don't like paying these higher rates. So, we go out and we shop around for new transportation companies, but even these new ones that come in start to realize the expense of moving these goods within these select areas. Because of situations like that, they have to plan for at least six or seven every winter, which means you have to take into account the loss of money.
 
      By having a dedicated transport route without personal mobility units on it, you could reduce the accident rate for transportation units. Now that'd be an amazingly great thing. How many truckers out there listening to this podcast right now would love it if they had their own dedicated highway system where they didn't have to deal with these little idiot drivers driving their own personal mobility units? How amazing is it? We are on a nice quiet back highway, just to say. 

       You're traveling along Highway 17 between Wawa and Marathon. It's all bush, it's quiet, it's inland, it may be the middle of winter, but even if it gets snowy it's not that bad of a highway, and you're traveling along because there's not a lot of traffic, it's quiet and it's great. You can these conditions and yet they've never been trained to drive that vehicle in those conditions and they come flying around you doing 120, passing you on the outside on a blind corner where there's no passing lane, all of a sudden, your buddy in transport heading south on the other side comes around the corner and nails that truck head on. How many truckers have been in those situations? You always get those morons. Hell, it's going to be middle of the summer, and just because your transport is regulated to not going faster than 10 kilometers an hour more than the speed limit, so on a 90-kilometer highway you can only do 100 kilometers an hour and you get those morons behind you that want to do like 120, 130 and they fly around you. They come close to sideswiping you. They get in front of you. Then they get pissed off and they hit their brakes. Try and brake check you. You got to slow down. It's just aggravating. By developing our own transportation network that's dedicated just to the movement of goods, we can reduce that. The people can have their own highway, which their gas tax and everything pays for, and the transportation network can have its own highway that the taxes from the warehouse and the movement of goods is paying for.
 
       Now, when you're going over really long distances, you always got to ask yourself why don't you just put it on a train. Everett, not everywhere has select areas, you know, after you leave the city of Toronto the next time you hit an intermodal facility. So, a facility that allows you to warehouse and take products on and off of trains to be able to be put into box trucks doesn't exist until the city of Winnipeg. So, the city of North Bay, Sudbury, sault Ste Marie, Timmins and Thunder Bay don't have one, where from Toronto to Winnipeg is nearly 2,000 kilometers and there's no intermodal facility. So, when we manufacture something, let's say Sault Ste Marie, it's steel on the flat deck of a truck and it's going to a manufacturing site, let's say Allstream building train cars in Thunder Bay. Well, you think, oh, why don't you just put it on a train? Well, they do have rail service there. But does the manufacturer in Thunder Bay have the ability to take that steel coil off in the city? No, they don't. There's no intermodal facility.
 
         So, to bypass this whole dedicated transport route, at least in my little select area of the world, having more intermodal facilities would help with this substantially, because then you take the transports off the roadway and then a person like myself complaining that we need the limited access highway. The government can literally say well, there's no more trucks on the road. It's just, you guys Figure it out. There's not enough traffic to warrant expense. But because they don't, that truck has to travel from Sault Ste Marie to Thunder Bay over six and a half hours on a truck on a highway that gets shut down at least once a month during the wintertime. Even in the summer they have landslides due to heavy rains, which shut the highway down too because it rides along the coastline of Lake Superior.
 
        Now, building a dedicated transportation route. So, instead of making a limited access highway for all of us to use, by having a dedicated transportation route that stretches from Sault Ste Marie all the way at least up until Thunder Bay, backing behind all the main hills, so it's away from the coastline, we could decrease the number of shutdowns we have for these transportation units. Now, let's say you're going from a big city like Toronto all the way to Montreal. Well, to bypass that situation, it's similar to you know, they both have intermodal facilities. But sometimes you want to do LTL services, you need to get that product overnight. Well, there's the 401, right that runs between both of them. That's our main transportation corridor right now. Yeah, but Montreal and Toronto are some of the most congested cities in Canada. When you hit them at specific times, you can lose hours of time stuck in traffic, which means more money coming out of your pocket with your truck sitting there idling because they can't travel at the high rate of speed. 

        Now, building a brand-new highway system let's say the 407 that they originally started we allow only transports on the 407. So, you can now go from Hamilton all the way out to the 115 up to Peterborough. But let's extend that all the way out up to Ottawa and over to Montreal, and then have one from Montreal going all the way up to Quebec City. You can now go from Toronto all the way to Quebec City on a dedicated transportation route called the 407. Let's just call it that. Only transports are allowed on it. It's limited access. It goes from every major industrialized area to each other. Well, price reduction will happen, fuel consumption will decrease and our ability to move products will increase substantially by having these dedicated transportation routes. Now, if you want a pure example of dedicated transport routes, just go to Australia.
 
          They have giant mines that it's literally cheaper for them to put a road in than it is to build a railway. Why? Because these mines are way out in the middle of nowhere in the outback, and because it's so flat and so barren, it's easy to create a road back there to put a railway in. There's a lot more engineering construction that would go into it. And then, once the mine closes, what do you do with the railway? Literally just going to be left there to rot because there's no other purpose for it. So instead let's make a road, because when we're done with the road since it's dirt now we just give it back to nature. They have road trains, transports with six trailers behind them going back and forth between coal mines in Australia, but the road that they travel on is only for them. It's a dedicated transport route.
 
       Because it was cheaper and easier to use transports than it was to train all the stuff out, they created a dedicated transportation route to move the products from one select location to another. Now, when you're working with major cities, you've got tons and tons of manufactured facilities that you all have to take into account. I get it. It'd be so much easier if you could just plop, tell everybody they got to move into this one select location. You still have to use surface roads, but by creating a ribbon through them, you can make it easier to move the goods once they get off surface roads. You have to remember the original dedicated transportation routes across any country was railway.
 
       Can you add personal mobility units to a railway? You could if you really wanted to, but not really. Those things are huge. When you leave the province of Ontario and you go into Manitoba, you're allowed to have two 53-foot-long trailers, tandem, on a highway and they're also allowed to have the triple trailers. Ontario we can't do that. We have too many corners and we also have standard two-lane highways that were built in the 1960s, so we don't have a dedicated transportation infrastructure for the movement of goods. Manitoba is flat. It's wide. Like their, highways are not limited access, but the two lane broken highways are long ways away from each other. So, you can get these massive transports out on these highways, going from one place to another easily. That means you can move even more goods in one shot. 

        Dedicated transport route across the province of Ontario, specifically made for transportation of goods only, would be able to encompass this. You then could supply transports that have two or three 53-foot-long trailers behind them. You can move three times the amount of goods with one select driver. And how much money are you going to save? Think about it. If you could train stuff everywhere, you could save even more money, because there's only a handful of people operating. That train is across the country that you have to pay for, but you've got millions upon millions in goods being shipped, far outweigh the human aspect of it.
 
          Developing a dedicated transportation route for transport similar to trains and their railway lines could help alleviate all of this. You don't even have to make it a big four-lane highway. You can make it a dedicated two-lane highway, or even do the three-lane. That's been famous in a lot of Scandinavian countries and we're actually trying to put one in Ontario right now on Highway 11. It's called the two plus 1 Highway. It actually exists in Canada in one aspect, between Hull and Montreal, I believe that's Highway 15, or is it the 50? One of those two, and they have a one plus two. So, it's three lanes and every once in a while, you'll lose your secondary passing lane and become a single lane highway.
 
        Now, if you created these dedicated transport routes similar to that kind of like railways, however, once in a while, a railway, being a single rail going all the way down, will eventually have breakoffs so that other trains can go and sit there as one longer. One can pass them by creating a two plus one highway system for the dedicated transport routes, bridges over top and ease and access. All you have to do is add a few gas stations, basically make a brand-new truck stop, and these things could support themselves. You now have transports with three trailers behind them being able to stop, get food, fill up easily on a highway. If one truck can move a little bit quicker than the other, one where you only have a truck with one 53-footer behind it and he needs to pass the truck with three 53-footers behind him, he could just wait until he gets to the passing lane. You put either a center median in or you make it a broken highway kind of like the limited access highway systems. You have to remember, until we can have the ability to make flying vehicles actual flying vehicles like you see in Star Wars or Futurama, or if you really want to go that far.
 
        The fifth element okay, until we get to a system like that, we still need roadways underneath of us and a dedicated highway system for the transportation of goods across any major country can really help its system out. It'll help alleviate transports on main highway systems. Because if you've all seen major accidents in the middle of wintertime or even the middle of summertime, it's always a car that gets hit by a transport because the vehicle was doing something stupid in front of a massive vehicle on the road. And even if it was the transport's fault, when they wipe out, they're more likely to take out more than one little vehicle. Now we're not saying you need to develop these dedicated transportation routes everywhere, but utilizing them in major transportation corridors to alleviate transport stuck in congestion. Think about it If you had a dedicated transport route, like I said, that went from, let's say, even just Montreal to Toronto, that would help alleviate all those transports on the 401. How many times have you been stuck on the 401 in Toronto, being surrounded by transports in the middle of the day and you're like, oh, why can't they just put this crap on rail, not understanding that not everything can be shipped via rail because there are not enough intermodal facilities across this country. If we had more of them, it would help out. I just want to point that out. If our Premier of the Province of Ontario is listening right now, take a listen to what I'm saying. ​

        These transportation corridors can also be utilized in other areas Forestry and mining Hell. You can even have them in major farming institutions. Make it easier, those dedicated transportation routes. You can have dedicated farming routes to move their equipment on one standard gravel road that nobody else is allowed to use the transport systems for mining. Well, if it's too far in and it's too expensive to put rail in, you can utilize your trucks to move that product. They're talking about getting in the ring of fire and building a brand-new road up there. Sure, railing all that stuff out would be a lot easier. But to get in there to build the mines, we can get a roadway first. When the roadway is built, we're going to need that to truck stuff in and out constantly. Because unless you're going to put an intermodal facility in Greenstone and then one up at every single mine up there, you might as well just throw it on a truck and drive it up. Because literally by the time you get it on at the intermodal facility, bring you, get it on at the intermodal facility, bring it up to the other one and get it off. That truck could have literally driven that entire distance and delivered it within that amount of time. So, you can better utilize transports.
 
       Forestry already kind of has this system in play with logging roads. Logging roads are essentially dedicated routes built through the backwoods to access the areas where they're logging. Now there are other people that do utilize these roads off-road 4x4 drivers, quads and side-by-sides, oh, and dirt bikes. Dirt bikes love to use them too. Now, even occasionally mountain bikers will utilize them, but they have to be able to remember that this is a dedicated transportation route set up for only the transportation of logging trucks, not for you. So, in a sense, they kind of already exist in those situations.
 
       Our biggest mainstay for this entire podcast is about creating the dedicated transportation routes for the safe travel of goods across great distances. Every city's got roads and every city's got freeways. We all have systems in play to move these goods already, but in areas that are becoming more and more congested, the development of dedicated transportation routes is something that should be put into play, because moving our goods at a higher rate of speed than they are moving right now when they're stuck in traffic, can save us all time and money, which puts more money back in our pocket and more money into the pockets of the companies that are shipping them and the shipping companies, and hell if you don't want to go that far. You know they're more money into the pockets of the companies that are shipping them. And the shipping companies? And hell, if you don't want to go that far. You know they're creating the HOV lanes, the high occupancy vehicle lanes.
 
        If you want to make it simpler, make dedicated transport lanes on highways. It's the easiest way to do it. You can literally have one so you can have your HOV lane and then a dedicated transport lane on the far side. The only thing you have to do is you have to make police understand that personal mobility units are not allowed in that lane, unless you're literally a transport or a one-ton diesel pickup truck that's towing something more than a standard pickup rate. You're not allowed to use those lanes. It's for the transportation of goods only. It's just a great idea when you really think about it. In the end, do we really need this? Yes, it would help decrease traffic and congestion in some of the worst areas in the world. 

       Everybody always talks about creating these dedicated highway systems. They all think by building these big, limited access highway systems here, there and everywhere, it's going to help reduce congestion. But no, if you want proof of that, go to the state of California. My brother lived there. He occasionally he'd rent a vehicle for a couple of days because he'd be going out and doing stuff and he's traveling along and even get stuck in traffic in the city of San Francisco at any time of the day. He got stuck in traffic at two o'clock in the morning on a weekday, like why am I getting stuck in 30-minute backlog of traps? Because there are so many highway systems there and so many people like to go out for a drive constantly. They all use the highways. They don't use the surface roads. So, by creating more and more highways we're not reducing congestion, we're just creating more options for people to get around. So, in the province of Ontario the Premier is actually looking at building a brand new, slightly ring road from the Highway 400 all the way to the 401 to try and reduce congestion for transportation units called the 413. But he's going to be opening it up to everything Now.
 
      The Transportation Network has already stated that the 407 should become a dedicated transport route. All transport should not have to pay to utilize that. Vehicles should be charged because they're using a highway system that was intended for the movements of goods and the 407 goes through all major industrial park areas. That's amazingly great idea. Charge cars, not truck, kind of like those congestion charges. Maybe those are things you have to start looking at. If you can't afford to build these dedicated transportation routes, you have to look at the alternatives Dedicated transport lanes, tolling standard vehicles to keep congestion down or essentially pushing trucks onto their own dedicated surface routes.
 
        All I know is that we really need to do something about this, because every time I go down to Toronto, I always get stuck going from the 400 onto the 401. And every time I'm stuck trying to exit on those two lanes that merge very quickly. On the other side there's always a ton of transport sitting next to me. A lot of people bitch and complain about it, but I don't. I sit there and look at that and I literally see dollar signs just being blown out the window as that truck moves slower and slower. He's losing money. I'm only losing time. They're more important to the economy than I am. Just remember that the transport's moving the goods does more for the economy than you sitting in your car. So, yes, let's create these dedicated transport routes and let's get off our asses and try and build a viable transportation network for the movement of goods only where we take the personal mobility units out of the equation. We've been trying everything to get people to take public transit systems for years. Maybe the next step is to literally strip them of their highway system. In the end, who's going to win? Well, if maximum overdrive has taught us anything, the trucks will always win. 

        So, if you like this podcast, please like, share or comment about it on any of the major social feeds or streaming sites that you've found the AutoLooks podcast on, from Spotify to iTunes, you can find the AutoLooks podcast anywhere. So, give us a like so you can follow us and find out more podcasts as we release them on a weekly basis, every single week. We have for six seasons already and over 250 episodes. We're going to be bringing you more information about the automotive industry and transportation network in the future, so give us a like, comment about this and tell us what you think about dedicated transportation routes, and then share it with your friends, your family, your boss, your transportation network people, the transportation company you use to get your products to your shop. Tell them about it and tell them what you think about these dedicated transport routes. See if they like the idea. Maybe we could start something. Maybe we could push the governments to try and at least give it a test phase to build one of these dedicated highway routes. Hey, it's worth a shot. You have to remember the interstate system. The original limited access highway was given a shot too, and we all went for it. Now let's try and give the transportation infrastructure world something new to look forward to.
 
       And after you've liked it, after you've commented about it and after you've shared this podcast on all streaming sites and social feeds that you've found or are attached to, stop by the website, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe on the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at [email protected] from myself, Everett jay, the host of the AutoLooks podcast and the owner and operator of the AutoLooks.net website and Ecomm Entertainment Group. Strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride the transportation network is going to take us on.

Everett J.
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