I also fail to see how wild exaggerations of objective realities advance the analysis.Joe Guy wrote:Have you never waited in your car at a railway crossing with a freight train passing?Andrew D wrote:Joe Guy wrote:I fail to see how trains which are not traveling on public roadways can impede the flow of traffic on public roadways.
You have enough time to order a pizza and have it delivered to your car.
Yes, I have had to wait for passing trains many times. Not once have I spent more than five minutes waiting for a passing train to clear the roadway.
(I did once have to wait quite a bit longer, but that was for a stopped train that was blocking the roadway. Under the circumstances, it hardly constituted a traffic impediment warranting any significant policy consideration: I was stopped on an unpaved, dead-end road heading west off of I80/US95 thirty-five miles or so north of Lovelock, Nevada; during my half-hour (give or take) wait, when I wasn't running my engine, not even one car joined me; and when the train finally moved again, there was not even one car waiting on the other side either.)
Anyway, on those rare occasions when one is stopped by a passing train, the train passes, and that's the end of it. Trucks traveling with one on the road, rather than merely passing across it, constitute a much more substantial impediment. Mile after mile after mile after mile, they continuously impede the flow of traffic. Get stuck behind one, and you could easily spend an hour grinding along at a speed far below your speed limit.
And that happens on multi-lane highways also. You're cruising along, a line of trucks appears in the right-hand lane (which is, of course, where they belong). Then the truck at the back of the line moves into the left-hand lane and starts to pass the others. They're doing 55, so the truck doing the passing goes at 56. Mile after mile, even though your speed limit is 70, you are condemned to doing 56.
After that truck -- finally! -- finishes its passing maneuver and moves back into the right-hand lane, what do you see in front of you? Another truck blocking you while passing another line of trucks. And then another, and then another, and then another .... On a 100-mile stretch of I5, you can easily spend 80 miles forced to travel at 20% below your speed limit.
The fundamental problem is that the entire trucking industry operates by dumping its problems on the rest of us. Your truck won't travel at normal speeds on particular roadways? Fine. Either you get a better truck, or you stay off of those roadways.
It is, at bottom, the responsibility of the person/entity that is impeding the flow of traffic not to impede the flow of traffic. But the trucking industry finds that inconvenient, so it simply decides to solve its problem by turning that into everyone else's problem instead.
Which, again, is another example of the amoral attitude to which I have been pointing: "I matter; you don't."