Although our current transportation system is the most advanced it has ever been, it is fraught with inefficiencies and consumes more than twice the fuel and time than is required.
As an example, shipping an item today requires it to be boxed, labeled, in some cases palletized, placed in a container or trailer, and then transported.
Each step in this process adds additional weight, also known as tare, to the original item as well as increasing its volume.
Additionally, as displayed in the image above, the transportation mode itself adds tare.
It’s important to realize that both weight and volume determine fuel consumption in the shipping process.
Because a product’s volume is directly proportional to the overall weight of the equipment required to ship the product, increasing volume results in increasing fuel consumption.
In simpler terms, the product may only be a load of packaging peanuts, but if it requires 10 boxcars to transport, then the process will consume the fuel required to move those 10 boxcars plus the locomotive. All this cost is passed down to the customer.
In the following pie chart, we show a comparison between the 2.1 billion tons of freight moved by the 7 Class I railroad companies in 2019, and the total weight of the equipment required for this process.
Our calculations are very conservative and based on a “perfect conditions” scenario with a 0% grade and all boxcars filled to max weight capacity.