this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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This is not accurate at all. For posterity (and forgive me if this sounds condescending) “last mile” doesn’t literally mean last mile. It refers to taking cargo from a backbone transport route (ports and railway depots). This last mile is often hundreds of miles.
Trucking margins are slim, and to stay in the black, trucks need to be on the road most of the time. The larger companies have their trucks in motion near 24x7, while the independent drivers stop when law dictates for sleep (but often skirt these laws). Trucks which require frequent charging would be much less efficient. They would be more expensive than ICE trucks. This is why we have so few EV trucks on the road. Because today, they are not yet viable for most last mile transport.
Trams have the same limitations of railways: high capex and inflexibility. Rails and trams can’t be economically built to every town and front door.
Then your railway infrastructure sucks. Also, the semantics of the terms (no matter how well-used they are in your country, in your industry, etc) are bonkers: Anything going depot to depot is, by sane definition, not last mile, even if one of those depots is only reachable via truck.
I agree that it’s not a literal translation, but many terms are not literal. I work in the shipping industry and the term is well used internationally. It’s taught in business schools and well documented. I think sometimes there are many terms for domain specific knowledge which aren’t clear at first for people who aren’t educated or involved in the field. I certainly don’t hold it against you. I am only offering my experienced perspective.
U.S. railway infrastructure is poor. Still, most towns don’t have sufficient populations to justify commercial railway lines. Europe’s railway infrastructure is often run at a loss. There is an argument to be made about imputed negative externalities, but this should be done with both eyes open. It would be very expensive to expand rail in the U.S., and even if hundreds of billions were permanently allocated, most towns would still not have rail access.
I’m not being a fatalist about this. EV trucks are on the way and will be viable eventually. I have faith in capitalism and the technological progress it provides. We’re just not there yet.
You are going back to front. You assume that EV trucks would need to fit in the current infrastructure and the current market. But both need to change and there needs to be a regulatory framework that forces and incentivises this change. So with this logistics need to become more expensive at first, when the transformation needs to be financed. But they will become much more expensive otherwise, as trucks are very inefficent, in particular for labor. And we see less and less workers willing to to take the difficult work conditions for the relatively bad pay. In the UK alone after Brexit there is a driver shortage between 50k and 100k. In mainland Europe it is similiar and in the US it will soon look like this too, unless the US makes it much easier to migrate for work. But even then it is only temporary fixes to the underlying problem of an inefficent system.
In a new infrastructure, maximising the use of trains and rivers, combined with an end to absurd manifacturing supply lines, that only work because of the ruinous competition in logistics, we will have an environment where the last mile is really just a few miles.
I assume ceteris paribus because that is most likely in a democratic nation. It’s unlikely that the U.S. public would agree to hike their taxes by 10% to pay for a radical national transport restructure. Change usually takes place gradually. Economical EV trucks, which are probably less than a decade away, will negate the need to impoverish the nation. They will plug neatly into the existing infrastructure.
Still, the U.S. really does need rail improvements. These can and should happen either way.
The US is impoverishing itself by continueing on the truck based logistics. They help ramp up cliamte change, which is already fucking over the south of the US but will continue to get much much much worse. The US will be a nation of impoverished people unless massive social, political and infrastructural change will happen.