Freight logistics

This title isn't a clever play on words. This is actually a blog post on transportation.

I've been reading an interesting book entitled - don't laugh - The Structure and Dynamics of New Zealand Industries. It's quite dry in most parts, but a lot of intriguing facts slip through the gaps between economic statistics. For example, two firms have controlled virtually the entire beer market since 1970s, and in 1999 about 70% of the beer brewed was something called "brown beer" - "full-coloured, relatively sweet, with a malty taste and an ale-like character... a lager of a type unique to New Zealand." (124)

That fact in turn illuminates another question that has been perplexing me: Why NZers have a preference for Mac's Gold, a truly terrible lager, when Lion Brown is (a) cheaper and (b) tastes beerish rather than like water adulterated with car exhaust. Lagers are relatively new here, and after roughly a century of drinking basically the same couple of types of brown beer, people here are keen to try something, anything else. The American beer market, on the other hand, has long since been built on crappy lagers, and as a result I am happy to try anything else.

But I digress.

Over the weekend, Anne and I went down to Marlborough, where we drank a lot of wine and took all sorts of Victorian-style transportation. We bridged the gap between the islands on a ferry, biked 20 miles to Blenheim, biked around vineyards, canoed, and took the train back to Picton. The train, like all of those in NZ, ran on narrow-gauge tracks, and as we stood up on the open viewing deck we could feel it sway from side to side. (Pretty much every other developed country, and many of the developing ones, use wider tracks, which reduce sway and allow faster speeds. NZ decided to build narrow tracks in the late 1800s in order to get the railway through the mountainous central North Island.)

I think about trains quite a lot. My petroleum geologist dad reckons that we're probably more than half the way through the earth's reserves of petroleum - i.e. the stored sun energy of hundreds of millions of years - and using oil at a quickening pace. When oil runs down, newer means of transport - cars, trucks, and airplanes - will become more costly. Possibly too costly. So maybe more trains are in our future.

The history of freight logistics in NZ is mainly the history of trains. From the 1930s to the 1980s, New Zealand's government pursued a policy of regulation and subsidies that favored rail transport over most other forms. Rail was preferred in part because, as a trading department of the government, prices and staffing levels could be fixed to meet industrial and employment policy needs. This led to a variety of inefficiencies - of which more later. In the 1980s, this regulated system was rapidly dismantled - the Railways Department was corporatized, and later privatized, and road freight was deregulated.

I am reading Structure and Dynamics in part for the "signs of the times" moments that it provides. In particular, I found this passage fascinating:

Prior to 1961, trucks were only allowed to move freight up to 30 miles (50 kms). In 1961 the protection limit was raised to 40 miles (67 kms). At this time several commodities were exempt, including livestock. The revised limit was further increased to 94 miles (150kms) in 1977, and the exemptions were increased. (191)

This was done mainly to protect the government's investment in costly rail infrastructure. But after its election in 1984, the Labour Party dismantled these controls (and a remarkable array of others - indeed, Structure and Dynamics often reads like "the New Zealand economy après le déluge) in favor of increased efficiency.

Efficiency they got. The new, market driven railways cut staff by 3/4 and managed to carry the same amount of freight. "For example, ten years ago it took seven to ten days to ship goods from Auckland to Christchurch. Today [1995], Tranz Rail offers a door-to-door service in under 24 hours." (193) They did so by getting rid of most of the funny little rules that formerly predominated, such as the requirement to stop trains after traveling a certain distance, which caused the Railways Department to set up tearooms and loading docks in the middle of nowhere.

(Or, as my dad's favorite bit of verse goes, "The squalid tea of Mercer is not strained.")

In short, the "controlled" freight logistics sector made transport of goods much more costly and time-consuming than it could have been. What I'm thinking about, I suppose, is the social world that would tend to produce. In a very basic sense, raising transport costs tends to make local production more economic. (It also tends to raise the costs of goods, and hence reduces their availability to most people.) So in a world of costly, slow transport, one effectively without road freight, we may see more localized economies. People and products would move less, and money would tend to circulate within smaller regions rather than nationally or globally.

So, for example, most rural NZ towns tended to have a cheese factory, as it was harder to transport milk long distances before it spoiled. (As Structure and Dynamics also comments, the level of technology also helped to spread around cheese manufacturing, as refrigerated milk tankers were only developed in the 1950s.) I would imagine that other types of production were also more dispersed.

I don't expect a return to the bad old days of the highly regulated economy. Like it or not, today's standards of governance - openness to trade and capital flows, deregulation, policies to foster competition - are pretty well entrenched. Economists, policymakers and businesses are in agreement on these policies, and other voices are poorly organized and rarely heard within the state machinery.

Governments aren't going to get back into the business of telling truck drivers how far they can ship goods. But I don't think that it's entirely unreasonable to expect fuel constraints to severely curtail the use of road transport. In the absence of major technological change, we might end up having to ship goods by rail or not at all, and at higher prices. This could in turn lead us back to a situation like that in pre-1980s New Zealand - more local production, more expensive goods, etc.

On the other hand, one general principle about the evolution of societies is that, absent a catastrophic exhaustion of natural resources, they tend to become more complex over time. To put it in Frederic Jameson's terms, the ease of cognitive mapping (i.e. representing the social space in a way intelligible to an individual) tends to decline as society expands. The only ultimate limit to this is the the ability of the planet's ecosystems and natural resources to sustain increased complexity.

Progressive change - even of a revolutionary nature - is unlikely to return things to a state of primitivist simplicity, as doing so would undermine its foundations in labyrinthine modern life. Conservative, reactionary, and fascistic change are similarly unable to return things to a "simpler past", in spite of their shared mythmaking around original sin, pastoralism, and racial purity.

On Jameson's terms, there's no turning back - we can shift from trains to trucks and back again, but the general drift will be towards increasing unmappability. All we can do is to widen the gauges of the tracks, and tell bigger and better stories about all of the places to which our labor is flowing.