by emersonbiggins » Wed 20 Aug 2008, 11:45:38
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Javaman', 'I')f each person, living in a city with a population density of 3500/square mile, ate a pound of food per day, you would need to supply your stores with 24,500 pounds of food per week, assuming each store served a one-square mile area. An 80,000 pound truck carrying 50,000 pounds could supply four of those stores by making two trips per week. With your system, how many smaller trucks are you going to use? How much fuel do you expect to save?
We're going to use 2 smaller trucks for each tractor-trailer, each with a 20-23,000-lb payload and 33,000 GVWR.
Here's one such truck:
Mitsubishi Fuso FM330, which gets about twice the mileage of a tractor-trailer, at
15 MPG. Additional gas expenditures for double the trucks is a net zero, if not slightly in favor of the smaller trucks, as large tractor-trailers do quite well, e.g. Wal-Mart's 'efficient' fleet, to get 7 MPG on the highway.
Now, we are not necessarily hiring more drivers, or buying additional trucks, as we can simply increase the frequency of their delivery trips, so that no additional costs are incurred on the labor front. This increased frequency capitalizes on the bonus of added time, as the distribution of goods would also be relocalized and assisted by high-speed bidirectional freight rail to quickly move hundreds of tons of perishable goods inland from the ports, and not in the form of hundreds of trucks scattered all of the country, with their owners scurrilously trying to stay in the black for another month.
Urban interstates could give way to more pedestrian-scaled boulevards, and street widths and curb radii could be reduced accordingly, so that building and maintaining streets does not become cost-onerous under the weight of 80,000-lb rigs and increasingly limited budgets.
The real money savings would come in the form of less maintenance on the existing interstate system, and truckers beginning to pay for their commensurate share of damage on the system, something that does not take place today.