Speaking of using petroleum
Speaking of cluelessness, what on earth is the American trucker's convoy about?
Whatever it was supposed to be over, that moment passed. This for all the world has the feel of people who arrived at an event about a week late. "What, this isn't the Johansen wedding. . .where's the food?"
This was, of course, inspired by the Canadian Freedom Convoy. I had a post on that, but that was really distinctly different in the way it spilled over into other complaints. I'm not sympathetic with the event, but it came to be the focus of a lot of conservative Canadian discontent with a nation's politics that has become extremely liberal.
It really was a Canadian thing, none of which prevented confused right wing Americans from voicing their support on something that they don't really know anything about. Most Americans, I fear, couldn't pinpoint Edmonton on a map if their life depended on it.
Anyhow, the spectacle inspired a pretty pointless American truckers convoy, which is protesting. . . well who knows what it's protesting. In a column by a liberal columnist, one of the protesters, for example, noted that they didn't want to be "digitalized", which means this protest just seems to be, well, a protest without a point.
Or maybe it does have one, but not the one that they're voicing or that they even realize.
Long haul trucking in the United States doesn't really have a long history. Prior to the Second World War most long distance hauling of anything was by rail, not by truck. Rail itself dated only back to the second quarter of the 19th Century. Before that, for millennia, anything of substance moved by boat, and less bulky things moved by land at the speed of a draft animal. Indeed, for that reason, early in the nation's history projects to extend aquatic transportation, like the Erie Canal, were a big deal.
Rail was a radical alteration of the transportation system with a massive impact on the nation in all sorts of forgotten ways, including the pattern of settlement. Cities like Denver, Colorado became viable due to rail, without it, they'd be towns.
But through Federal subsidization of roads in the 20th Century, and particularly after World War Two, combined with advancements in automotive technology, long haul semi tractors with large trailers became a viable option in the mid 20th Century. By the 1950s, but not before then, they began to supplant rail. By the 1960s the process was well under way, while at the same time air travel and improved roads cut into rail passenger service as well, with railroads seeking to abandon that the latter.
Trucking as a profession was in fact glamorized. Even early on, Hollywood portrayed it that way, with such movies as They Drive By Night. Convoy, the Country & Western ballad, was one of only a collection of trucking songs that were on the airwaves in the 70s. At least two movies, once based on the Convoy song, portrayed trucking as glamorous in the same era.
Well, that's all largely passed. We're told now that there's a nationwide shortage of truck drivers, with the country being 80,000 drivers short.
All of the major automobile manufacturers are working on electric automobiles. That transformation will come much more rapidly there than in trucking. Automated trucks, without drivers, are being explored and exist on an experimental level now. But lurking in the back is the ultimate competition to the semi truck, the electric train.
Locomotives are already much, much, more efficient than trucks, and accordingly far, far more "green". The Burlington Northern in fact advertised that fact a few years back.
Predicting the future is always difficult, but I suspect that on a fairly significant level, the future of long distance transportation looks backwards. It's rail.
