Tractor Shortages

[RickB]

Many states exempt intrastate drivers from periodic physicals and having a medical card.

 

[RickB]

A first year business owner knows deductible from your taxes isn’t the same as paid for by the state.
$500 might be chump change to you.…..but opinions are like, well, you probably know…

I don't subsidize your license, insurance, registration or vehicle inspection fees. I'm not about to sign up to subsidize your drug tests or physicals.
Man up. It's the cost of doing business.

 

[jigs_n_fixtures]

Anyone who doesn’t understand that we subsidize trucking to a huge extent, doesn’t understand how this nation pays for roadways.

Trucks are about 5 to 15% of the traffic volume. Pay roughly five percent ot the cost of building and maintaining roadways, and cause 90 to 95% of the wear and tear to this roadways. The fuel taxes a truck pays for roadway construction /maintenance, are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the level of wear and tear they cause.

The wear/damage to a roadway is function of the tire pressure. My Tiny truck with four contact patches at 32 psi, does far less damage per ton mile, than my brothers 1-ton dually with six contact patches at 70-psi, and his truck does far less damage than a ten-wheeler at 120-psi.

We subsidize trucking heavily with our imbalanced financing, much to the detriment of our railroads, which pay their own maintenance costs.

And, if you stop and think on it for a bit, you realiz that probably 90% of what we are sending down our highways, really needs to be there. And, if we weren’t subsidizing trucking so heavily most of it would go by rail, with trucks for only the last forty miles or so.

Back in the late seventies, I was a manager at UPS. We could deliver packages almost anywhere in the United States, in five business days. We relied heavily on rail transport. Dedicated rail cars, and dedicated trailers were used to move packages from major hub to major hub. Where they were offloaded, sorted and put out on the package cars for delivery. I don’t see those rail cars, with trailers on them very often anymore. They are now putting those packages in smaller trailers, and dragging them down the highways. Which says to me, that due to the subsidized highways, it is less expensive to drag them down the highway, than put them on the rails. The delivery for non-air is still five days coast to coast.

 

[Hay Dude]

Anyone who doesn’t understand that we subsidize trucking to a huge extent, doesn’t understand how this nation pays for roadways.

Trucks are about 5 to 15% of the traffic volume. Pay roughly five percent ot the cost of building and maintaining roadways, and cause 90 to 95% of the wear and tear to this roadways. The fuel taxes a truck pays for roadway construction /maintenance, are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the level of wear and tear they cause.

The wear/damage to a roadway is function of the tire pressure. My Tiny truck with four contact patches at 32 psi, does far less damage per ton mile, than my brothers 1-ton dually with six contact patches at 70-psi, and his truck does far less damage than a ten-wheeler at 120-psi.

We subsidize trucking heavily with our imbalanced financing, much to the detriment of our railroads, which pay their own maintenance costs.

And, if you stop and think on it for a bit, you realiz that probably 90% of what we are sending down our highways, really needs to be there. And, if we weren’t subsidizing trucking so heavily most of it would go by rail, with trucks for only the last forty miles or so.

Back in the late seventies, I was a manager at UPS. We could deliver packages almost anywhere in the United States, in five business days. We relied heavily on rail transport. Dedicated rail cars, and dedicated trailers were used to move packages from major hub to major hub. Where they were offloaded, sorted and put out on the package cars for delivery. I don’t see those rail cars, with trailers on them very often anymore. They are now putting those packages in smaller trailers, and dragging them down the highways. Which says to me, that due to the subsidized highways, it is less expensive to drag them down the highway, than put them on the rails. The delivery for non-air is still five days coast to coast.

I would love to see rails reopened and used more. Too many trucks on the road. Less trucks, less drivers, less accidents, less trucker drug tests. We all win.

What you say is very true. When our interstate system was designed, rails carried far more traffic. Many of our roads were not originally designed for all these heavy trucks.

In my little hometown, we have one 4 lane concrete highway running through built in late 1950’s. They just finished a 1 year project removing large section of concrete dissolved by heavy trucks. New rebar drilled in and new concrete patches, some the size of tennis courts.
I bet heavy trucks did that damage.

 

[Steppenwolfe]

I don't subsidize your license, insurance, registration or vehicle inspection fees. I'm not about to sign up to subsidize your drug tests or physicals.
Man up. It's the cost of doing business.

EXACTLY!!!!