Coming soon to a highway near you:
The province is considering a pilot project to assess the use of long combination vehicles (LCV)—one truck hauling two 53-foot long trailers in tandem.
The government is under strong pressure from the trucking industry to adopt LCVs, which could result in huge cost reductions and allow truckers to compete on price with freight rail service.
Where, “truckers” = “people who own trucking companies” and not, ya know, people who drive trucks.
But besides that, we’ve got a little thing called the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, which as the law of the land mandates that:
e) greenhouse gas emissions will be at least ten per cent below the levels that were emitted in the year 1990 by the year 2020, as outlined in the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers Climate Change Action Plan of 2001
I don’t how that happens by pulling the rug out from under the rail industry.
And, yes, a single truck hauling two trailers is a bit more fuel efficient than two trucks hauling one trailer each. But the point is that if we’re going to make any meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector, we’ve got to shift lots of loads onto trains, now off trains.
This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2008.
