Our Highways Are Now The Warehouses

There's a move afoot to spend $2 billion of taxpayer's money on something called an intermodal freight transportation system for southern Ontario. The idea is that transport trailer trucks like this one will be put onto railcars at one end of the city of Toronto and shipped by rail to the other end where they'd be offloaded and carry on their way. The idea is they can get up to one million vehicles off the highway every year. Well, I'm all in favour of that. But whatever happened to piggy-back? I mean, don't we already do that? Put trucks on rail cars and ship 'em around the country? I don't see how this system is any different than that.

Secondly, to me, the problem isn't so much how they get trucks off the road as to: what are they doing on the road in the first place? Now, about twenty-five years ago, there was a system starting in Japan called "kanban"(?) which means "just in time". What would happen, for example, is that a car maker, instead of having a warehouse full of seats that would last him for a month, he'd get the seat supplier to ship him just as many seats as he'd need for a couple of hours of production. Presto. The car maker no longer has this big warehousing, doesn't have the carrying costs, doesn't have the insurance: makes it a lot cheaper for him.

From the seat supplier's point of view: same deal. He makes the seats, puts them on a truck and ships them out the door. So where do they all end up? They end up in the trucks. Our highways are now the warehouses. And what happens? Well, the seat supplier has cut his costs; the car maker's cut his costs; they've thrown all this onto the truckers. The huge competition - well, they have to cut their rates to cut their costs. The first thing that goes is safety. We're all dying from wheels hitting us in the face. And our roads are turning to dust because these trucks are multiplying like rabbits.

So, I don't exactly know what the solution is, but it seems to me that everybody's looking at their own individual little cost component; nobody's looking at the big picture. Nobody's got any vision as to where the real costs are. And, of course, it's the little guy that gets it. Now, I always thought government was supposed to provide that vision, but what are they doing? Well, they're cutting their costs too. They're cutting back everywhere. The only bureaucrats left seem to be the ones who are calculating the pensions for the politicians.

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