> Another way to look at this is to see the pitiful state of the rail network on the continent: the most efficient way to move goods and people over land, severely underused.
The US has an inferior passenger rail network. It's freight rail network is fine.
In the US, freight within the country is 82% road, 12% rail, 5% water. In the EU it is 77% road, 17% rail, 6% water.
I wonder how these are actually counted? Suppose a manufacturer ships a ton of goods from their warehouse in Fresno to a retail chain in New York. Let's say that shipment goes by truck from Fresno to Los Angeles, where it then goes by train to Chicago, and there by water to Albany in New York, and finally from there to a New York warehouse owned the retail chain.
Does that count as 1 ton by road, rail, and water? Or is it going to have some kind of weighting by mileage?
If it is not weighted than road is going to be several times rail nearly everywhere, because there are a lot of things shipped locally which is almost always going to be cheaper and faster by truck than rail. On top of that most things that go by rail are also going to go part of the way by truck, since most things aren't both produced and consumed close to railroad stations and so it is mostly likely a truck that gets them to and/or from the train.
1) We have one of the best freight river systems in the world: the Mississippi/Missouri. River transport is insanely cheap.
2) Our passenger rail system may be some combo of "worse than many developing-world nations" and "nonexistent", but our freight rail network's quite good. Rail's cheap.
3) We subsidize the everloving shit out of truck transportation, making it really cheap, too.
> and they invested in intermodal and double-stacked container freight, which is why the US has better freight traffic than Europe.
The US has the scale both financially and in terms of sheer area that makes freight traffic work well and profitable. In Europe, you have a lot of things making rail expensive - there's infrastructure like bridges or tunnels everywhere which means you can't double-stack, and there's millennia worth of villages and cities that you have to build around.
Add to that that most US freight is done with diesel-fueled locomotives which means that the US saved a lot of the money that Europe spent on electrification.
Rail is still incredibly cheap and efficient in the USA. In fact, the USA has some of the most cost effective freight rail in the world. [1]
Rail freight is also quite a bit larger than truck freight in the USA. A lot of things are railed across in an intermodal and then hitched onto a truck for regional delivery. [2]
In short, rail freight is massive in the USA and our primary mode of goods transportation.
> The Economist claims that the US has the best freight rail infrastructure in the world
We're talking about the greatest country on Earth. Even with the best freight rail infrastructure in the world, it may still not be up to American standards.
The "fundamental problem" is probably that America is a really big country, and there are lots of livable places in the US that are far from other population centers.
US actually has (arguably) the worlds best freight rail system in large part because the size makes long distance trucking less appealing. The real issue is cars and air traffic is heavily subsidized and freight has priority on most lines.
PS: For comparison the entire EU moved less than 1/10th a much freight miles (Mass * distance) as the US dispite having a similar sized economy.
Not sure of your source, but by most measures of efficiency US freight rail is the best in the world, and also carries 10x weight * distance per capita than Europe.
> But according to this, the US is third behind China and Russia on rail ton-miles
That's awesome if you're not interested in carrying people, but whether a network incapable of carrying people is "a decent rail network" is something many would dispute.
Also, Russia has ~44% of population of the US, yet it still outperforms the US in absolute terms? That's quite impressive for Russia in my book. Having said that, they've always been heavily dependent on rail to lower their transportation costs. Trucks and airplanes won't work for them nearly as well. So I'm not surprised if they're placed so high in rail freight ranking.
> The reason I'm skeptical of the numbers is that UP/US DoT reported 2.7T ton-KMs for 2018 [1].
I'm reading 1.7 on that page. Am I looking in the wrong place? It says "In 2018, 1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight (calculated by multiplying shipment weight in tons by the number of miles that it is transported) was shipped by rail, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation."
Yeah, the US rail system is the best in the world for freight. In other countries, passenger rail has priority, so the freight service suffers a bit. In the US, it's the other way around.
Sorry by that only applies to US passenger rail, US freight rail is an impressively efficient system. US freight trains are diesel-electric allowing them to benefit from the high mechanical efficiency of electric engines coupled with the high energy density of diesel fuel as a power source.
The US is second only to china in terms of ton-kilometers of freight transported and moves nearly an order of magnitude more freight by rail than the EU.
With the exception of China, which has both massive freight and transport rail systems, most countries tend to trade off between transport of freight. The reason the US's transport rail is awful is because it's freight rail is incredible. And though it may be diesel it is a remarkably efficient use of is (as opposed to the trucks necessary for transport if you don't use trains)
The US is number 3 in the world in both total tonne-kilometers and tonne-kilometers per capita shipped by rail, and it’s in the top 10 in percentage of freight moved by rail.
The US has one of the largest, most used freight rail systems in the world (both overall and per capita).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_countr...
http://www.economist.com/node/16636101
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