This strikes me as being essentially pro-social lobbying. Lobbying succeeds in a lot of cases because of things like: talking to the correct people who make the decision; easing the workload by providing a shovel-ready solution (for variants of shovel-ready that include write it this way; asking for specific things which don’t obviously harm the mission or reputation of the people they lobby.
Considering the importance of the logistics issue, a natural candidate is to develop one of the other suggestions further. For example, points 3 and 4 (temporary truckyard adjascent to a rail terminal) are kind of a matched set. Off the top of my head:
identifying suitable truckyard sites, and identifying the owners/managers who would have to give approval
pre-work on some of the expected objections, like environmental impacts
some considerations on costs:
the point that stuck out to me here was switching how the trains run to short shuttle trips. Trains hate moving empty, because they don’t get paid; the simple answer is to pay them; the government probably won’t but other parties further back in the chain might be motivated (like the ship owners who want their ships moving; maybe Amazon and Walmart want their new stock; maybe there would be government money available but they cannot do a contract with the rails for weird procurement rule reasons)
I feel like it might make sense to stand up a company called Emergency Logistics Incorporated or something, where the pitch is connecting the dots such that the ship owners who are hemorrhaging value are willing to pay the trains to get stuff out of the port so they can put more stuff into it. The Western US is scarcely the only place to have this problem; the whole world seems to be having issues like this.
This strikes me as being essentially pro-social lobbying. Lobbying succeeds in a lot of cases because of things like: talking to the correct people who make the decision; easing the workload by providing a shovel-ready solution (for variants of shovel-ready that include write it this way; asking for specific things which don’t obviously harm the mission or reputation of the people they lobby.
Considering the importance of the logistics issue, a natural candidate is to develop one of the other suggestions further. For example, points 3 and 4 (temporary truckyard adjascent to a rail terminal) are kind of a matched set. Off the top of my head:
identifying suitable truckyard sites, and identifying the owners/managers who would have to give approval
pre-work on some of the expected objections, like environmental impacts
some considerations on costs:
the point that stuck out to me here was switching how the trains run to short shuttle trips. Trains hate moving empty, because they don’t get paid; the simple answer is to pay them; the government probably won’t but other parties further back in the chain might be motivated (like the ship owners who want their ships moving; maybe Amazon and Walmart want their new stock; maybe there would be government money available but they cannot do a contract with the rails for weird procurement rule reasons)
I feel like it might make sense to stand up a company called Emergency Logistics Incorporated or something, where the pitch is connecting the dots such that the ship owners who are hemorrhaging value are willing to pay the trains to get stuff out of the port so they can put more stuff into it. The Western US is scarcely the only place to have this problem; the whole world seems to be having issues like this.