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Sorry folks, this months article is going to be a little bit dull and boring, you see the Road Transport Forum (RTF) recently commissioned Transport Engineering Research NZ (Ternz) to investigate and predict the future road freight growth out as far as 2020 and also to questimate the amount of that expected freight growth that can or could be carried by rail.
Result of this report: Not surprisingly the report indicated that freight volumes will likely double in the next fifteen years and rail, even working at its best, will only be able to take 20% of it. Remember this sentence because I’ll come back to it.
Now that’s brilliant news for the RTF and everyone else working in the road transport industry. Heaps of political mileage for the pro truck spin doctors, great news for truck manufacturers, road builders, parts suppliers, tyre manufacturers and every other person involved in or supplying the New Zealand Road Freight Industry.
But really terrible news for the pro-rail, anti-truck lobby.
(Oh dear, how sad, never mind).
And it certainly adds a lot of weight to the argument that our roads need a hell of a lot of money spent on them if we are going to drive into the future.
Now if you have ever read a report like this, they are dull and boring, I mean these things usually run twenty, thirty, forty, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages of graphs, research and investigations by the authors, quoting endless figures and statistics that has taken them countless hours of plain hard work to compile.
But they all have one thing in common, they put you to sleep.
I mean these things are serious insomnia killers, if you’re having trouble sleeping, grab one, start at page 1 and by page 3 you’re out brother.
Everyone I know goes straight for the bottom line and the writers know this too, because in reports like this the bottom line is called the Executive Summary and its always right at the front of the report. Now these Executive Summaries usually run to a page and give you the guts of the report in a few paragraphs, brilliant.
Usually they start with the purpose of the report, then go on to the findings in the report and then finish with the possible reason why the authors crystal ball gazing may turn out to be wrong.
(Now I certainly don’t want to denigrate anybody whose job it is to look into the future and predict what’s going to happen, I have to do this in my own work, and I know how hard it is, how long it takes and how easy it is to be wrong. And at the end of the day it all comes down to the terms of reference you’re given by the client to base your report around in the first place)
But the bottom line of this report is a real beauty. (Remember this is the bit that explains why it might be wrong)
I’ll quote it “Traffic congestion – and subsequent road pricing - and fuel costs may also affect the pattern of heavy vehicle growth in the future”
Brilliant “out” guys.
Now go back to the sentence I told you to remember at the beginning under result of this report, the key word in that sentence is likely, not definitely, not absolutely, but likely. You see the whole report seems to be based around the supposition that we are going to have an average 3 ½ % growth every year until the year 2020, but who really knows that, we may not.
Now the only way that you can definitely or absolutely know the future is to have guaranteed inside knowledge about what is definitely going to happen.
And there is only one person that I have heard, give a forecast about the future this year that definitely, absolutely has inside knowledge about what will probably happen in the future. That good old boy Texas oilman in the Whitehouse named George W. who said in February 2006 that the USA needed to be 75% off Saudi oil by 2025, because it’s running out.
If anybody knows, it’s him.
Now come on guys, stop wasting our money and lift your collective heads out of the sand. Get the boys at TERNZ to develop a report on how we are going to deliver all this freight in 2020 with no diesel in the tank.
That one will definitely keep me awake.
But then, that is “Just an old Truckers point of view”
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