Annual TRB meeting is on the wrong track
January 25, 2011
The Annual TRB meeting in Washington, D.C. is underway.
The hot topic for many of the sessions is: How do you factor transportation into more liveable communities?” However, most of the focus is on moving people.
The presentations address more pedestrian and bike ways, limited access city and town centers and streets, high speed passenger rail - rarely does freight even have a seat at the table! Part of the problem is that most definitions of liveability do not even include a mention of freight.
In fact freight is blamed for making communities less liveable without acknowledging that without goods movement it would be even less liveable. A key point: people = freight. More than 95 percent of consumer goods are delivered by trucks and 80 percent of our communities are served only by truck.
Planning that is focused on people only has the unintended consequence of placing impediments to the movement of freight. The more difficult it is move goods, the more expensive those goods become. Freight is important to any local economy, so in the future freight interests need to be represented and balanced against other factors in policy and planning.
I learned an interesting fact yesterday that puts a spin on the formulation of policy in Congress - the population density of Republican house districts is one half that of Democratic house member districts. Bottom line is that it is time to stop taking freight transportation for granted, it contributes to liveability…even if it is considered a necessary evil!
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