Step 3. Alter or reverse the marketplace forces that are damaging transportation efficiency

OnTrackPennsylvania will make transportation policy and investment more effective by bringing to light the marketplace dynamics that are currently driving the system toward inefficiency and greater societal cost. These issues are very often overlooked in national and industrial policy discourse.

We cannot rely on the marketplace to deliver efficient, sustainable transportation while continuing to accommodate the exclusion of significant societal costs from private-sector business decisions, thereby subsidizing ongoing inefficiencies. Public subsidies of freight highway transportation are contributing to a diminished vitality of many branch rail lines and a steady increase in the volume of trucks on rural, urban, and interstate highways. The OnTrackAmerica planning process will inform an intelligent transition to full cost accounting of the impacts of freight transportation.

In the face of these policy shortcomings, the logistics, warehousing, and indeed the rail industry itself are driving toward consolidation and terminalization of freight transportation, wherein direct, environmentally sound, local rail service is steadily declining. Transportation providers, as well as developers of real estate, distribution centers, warehouses, and other facilities, make business decisions based on short-term economic self-interest that have disastrous impacts on land use, transportation congestion, and the environment. As we will discuss in greater detail in step 5, the trend of siting and building sprawling warehouses without rail access presents serious implications for the overall costs of transportation and environmental protection.

A multiplicity of factors contributes to the reluctance of the general business community to participate in the creation of a sound transportation system for our state, country, and our continent. Indeed, according to a recent Cambridge Systematics survey of southern Pennsylvania, industrial developers place highway access #1 among 25 site selection criteria; rail access, however, is #24.

Other reports and recommendations produced by numerous transportation advocacy groups, commissions, committees and think-tanks omit the relevance of private sector business agendas. It is simply not enough to support transportation development through public policy and investment, without addressing the marketplace drivers that have the greatest impact on where our transportation system is heading.

This isn’t about placing government as the directors of transportation services, or land use, for that matter. But it is about coming together as a true “community of interests” to place environmental efficiency and full cost accounting as the primary marketplace forces. That is the path to achieving an optimal freight transportation system. However, clear and accurate data that would inform such a priority are not often readily available, and the mechanisms to research and amass that data too often do not exist. Therefore, to successfully influence these marketplace forces, a new set of metrics, discussed in the following section, must be established to clearly define new marketplace priorities.