Podcast Episode: 0253 |
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 |
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 It just took until the mid-60s before it was finally finished and by the time it was finally finished it was still out of date.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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#autolooks
Leave a Reply.
Categories
All
Adventure
Aftermarket
Brand
Cinema
Corporate
Country
Delivery
Design
Future
Games
Green
History
Holiday
Informative
Infrastructure
Interviews
Kids
Manufacturing
Market
Model
Movie
Music
Parts
Product
Q&A
Racing
Revival
Segment
Sub Brand
Sub-Brand
Technology
Television
Toy
Author
Looking to see where Everett J. came from or how he knows so much about the industry he loves. Then check out his page:
https://everettj-autolooks.weebly.com/
Archives
June 2025
May 2025
April 2025
March 2025
February 2025
January 2025
December 2024
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
August 2024
July 2024
June 2024
May 2024
April 2024
March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
July 2022
June 2022
May 2022
April 2022
March 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019