High Speed Trucking
Cross Country Trucking: Faster and lower cost than container shipping
Moving freight is integral to advanced societies. It has long been the case that the cost to move freight goes from lowest cost for ocean going freight in shipping containers, to moving containers on trains, to moving containers on trucks, to the most expensive, moving freight by air. Unsurprisingly, lowest to highest cost, corresponds to longest to shortest transit time.
Past economics of moving freight devolved into a fairly simple decision. How long can you wait for your goods? If you can wait a long time, then you can use the slowest and least expensive shipping method. Why is this the case? The cost to move freight boils down to the energy consumed per ton mile, and moving faster burns more energy.
Ocean container freight consumes the least energy to move one ton of cargo, one mile in distance. Calculations indicate that tunnel trucking will consume less energy per ton mile than does ocean freight movement.
If true, tunnel trucking will supplant all other forms of freight movement once the necessary tunnels are built. This is because tunnel trucking will be the fastest (except for air) and also the lowest cost. This turns the freight transportation world upside down because lower cost is not normally associated with superior performance.
To understand this it must be realized that the main cost to move freight is in essence a cost that derives from the speed of movement. Speed generates energy losses due to the resistance imposed by the viscosity of the fluid the vehicle is moving through. Air for all and air plus water for ocean freighters. The higher the velocity, the higher the viscous energy losses per mile of transport.
Transportation tunnels change this norm. Within tunnels air can be blown down the tunnel with the vehicles at say, 90MPH. This means that to the vehicle, movement at 120MPH is as if the freight is being moved at just 30MPH, the speed of the headwind experienced by the tunnel truck
120MPH truck velocity - 90MPH tunnel wind velocity = 30MPH headwind
For trucking today on a surface freeway at 60MPH, 50% to 75% of the energy consumed results from aerodynamic drag imposed on the truck by the atmospheric air. the energy consumed scales as the square of the velocity so that doubling the velocity from 60MPH to 120MPH would normally increase the energy consumed to move freight by 4 times. Conversely, reducing the headwind from 60MPH to 30MPH reduces the energy required to move the freight 4 fold.
Note: Power scales as the cube of the velocity. This means doubling the velocity will increase the power demand 8 fold. However, doubling the velocity also cuts the travel time in half. Accounting for these factors, the total energy consumed scales as the square of the velocity. Doubling the velocity increases energy loss by a factor of 4. Tunnels cut the velocity of the headwind in half, decreasing the energy required to just 1/4 of that expended by trucks on a surface freeway at 60MPH or 1/16th the energy demand at 120MPH.
A tunnel truck at 120MPH will consume 1/16th the aerodynamic energy of a truck on a surface freeway at the same speed.
While this is a simplistic explanation, calculations anticipate that the energy consumed per ton mile of freight movement will be lower for tunnel trucking than it is for ocean going freight.
How would this change the way we move freight if this is correct?
The answer is: Ships from China to the USA will no longer pass trough the Panama Canal.
It will cost less to move a container from China to an eastern US destination by off loading it on the west coast and then tunnel trucking it to the destination in the east, including cities with eastern ports. Rather than shipping it to an east coast port for unloading and then trucking it inland to the final destination, containers will be off loaded to western US ports and then tunnel trucked across the country at a cost lower than shipping and at a far faster speed.
For urban tunnels the primary source of toll revenue will come from private citizens paying tolls to use the tunnels for commuting to and from work. For long distance tunnels, the primary source of toll revenue will come from trucking freight cross country.
From a trucking company’s perspective, the energy cost to move freight through tunnels will be so much lower that the overall cost will be less than trains and or surface freeway trucking in spite of the toll paid. This result stems from the fact that the aerodynamic resistance to air moving down a smooth bore tunnel is far lower than the resistance to a truck moving through the atmosphere.
Within the tunnels, trucks can move faster and at the same time, incur a smaller aerodynamic energy loss per mile travelled.
For cross country tunnels the long distances mean the tunnels will necessarily pass through long expanses of countryside where the land costs less than in cities. This enables the tunnel operator to acquire acreage upon which to build solar farms to power the tunnel blowers. By 2030 the Office of Efficiency and Renewable Energy anticipates that solar farms will produce utility scale energy for around 3 cents per kilowatt hour.
At just 3 cents per kilowatt-hour energy cost, trucking in transportation tunnels should be less expensive than the cost to move freight on ocean going container ships. What this means is that in the distant future, we will probably construct tunnels that run from the east coast of the United States, across the country and up to Alaska, then across the Bering Straight and across the Asian continent and all the way to Europe. Most shipping routes will be replaced by tunnel transportation routes.
For now, however, more modest projects offer developers profit margins that make building transportation toll tunnels attractive investments. Each billion dollar investment should return a net worth value in net present value of the toll income around five billion. That’s a net profit, or ROI, of around 500%.
Hopefully it’s obvious that this ROI is dependent on where a tunnel is constructed. While there are thousands of locations to profitably build tunnels around the world, there are even more places to build tunnels where no one would use them and the venture would lose money.
Care must be taken in choosing the route to follow with a transportation tunnel. We can help estimate the ROI for any tunnel project where the Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) is known. An easy rule of thumb is to simply contemplate the routes where the most traffic flows. Whether trucking or urban commuters, heavily used routes will make the best places to build the first transportation tunnels.
Within the US, this means cross country routes such as I-10, I-40, I-80 running coast to coast, or the most popular routes running north to south. Within urban settings, this means routes like I-405 in Los Angeles or any other major city where traffic becomes stop and go on a regular basis during commuter rush hours. The higher the traffic load, the larger the ROI will be and this goes for both truck and auto routes.
In addition to routes where the toll revenue will pay for the tunnel cost, municipalities may pay for all or part of the construction. For example, in a place where the municipality desires to add a traffic lane, constructing a tunnel will cost less and be less disruptive during construction than adding a lane to an existing freeway.
In places where winters are cold, there will be no snow inside of the tunnels. The temperature inside of tunnels will be fairly constant year round because the bottom of the tunnels will be approximately 20 feet below the surface. At this depth, the ground temperature is very constant year round and remains around 40 degrees F and above, across the entire US lower 48 states.
Transportation tunnels will be constructed because:
Many or most will be profitable
They are free of inclement weather year round
They increase traffic throughput without requiring surface land
They can be built without disturbing life on the surface.
We can help you estimate the benefits for any transportation tunnel project you are interested in considering.
Thank you for your interest in transportation tunnels