Methods of Transportation

Alright, welcome to our short lecture on

transportation

methods

for industrial development. I stole the slides from a guy named David Palmer who works at Eagle Crest High School in Colorado. I am, of course, Miss Skull and I will be your host for today's conference. Give a brief note on formatting that might influence how you take notes on each slide. Let me go ahead and show you what you're going to see is the type of

transportation

and then you're going to see some pros and To see some cons and that's really what we're going to talk about, you're also going to have a picture to help illustrate it so when you go through and take notes, it might be helpful to just take two column notes basically in a table format it has a pro side and a con side and then down on the left side it just lists the different types of transportation so we started to dig into that.

The first type of transportation we are going to talk about is air transportation. right and air transport has a lot of really good things going for it it's very fast it doesn't take long to transport products from one place to another it's very safe it's much harder for kidnappers, for example, or for thieves to steal things because there are only There are fewer points where products come out, it's great and really amazing if we talk about things like fresh food, they are things that have to be moved from one place from the origin to the market very, very quickly, okay, for example, bananas from Argentina or wherever bananas are grown in South America, they tend to fly because they need to get them from one place to another very, very quickly.

Well, some of the cons, some of the negatives, it's very, very expensive to ship things by mistake. Why, for example, if you go to the post office and say you want to send a postal package, which means you put it on a truck, it takes a lot longer but it also costs about $25 for first class shipping, but Is it also air travel? I have a smaller cargo tonnage, so there is less space on the plane, even on cargo planes, to ship things than, for example, on big ships. And speaking of large ships, we are talking about container ships or barges.

In the image we have here is a great illustration of what one of those container ships looks like. You can see what it really has - they are literally those big containers that you see on the back of semi-trailers just stacked and depending on the ship it will depend on how deep they are stacked and how many are on the deck, but they can stacking a lot of cargo on those ships, so it's very economical largely because the unit price is very low, the more stuff there is. You can put in a shipping type, the less money each item costs and this contains a lot of things.

It's also nice because containers can be transported to and from ships to trucks or trains very easily, literally just putting them on cranes. and drop them, okay, so it's economical, you can ship a lot of things, most of the goods in the world, by the way, when you go abroad, you go on container ships, okay, and it's easy, when you get to that point fragile, moving it from the ship to a different type of transportation some of the cons it is very very slow, items can take days or even weeks to get from one place to another, it's okay, it's much better than it used to be obviously , since we use motor boats and not sailboats, um but it's still especially compared to airplanes, very, very slow, you run a clear risk of piracy, especially depending on where you are in the world and how safe the waters are , so, for example, not so much now, but for a long time.

Right next to the Horn of Africa, near Somalia, there is a huge piracy problem. There's still a little problem, but not as bad as it used to be, where you would literally catch these pirates, go up, and take control of the ship. Okay, and then they would rescue the ship. One of the disadvantages of this is that you can only use it where there is water. Container ships really only work, and by the way, when we say water, what we're talking about is oceans. Don't send container ships up and down the river, right, you'll never find a container ship in Columbia or Mississippi or something, okay, these are ships with open sea ports, okay, so there are limits to where they can go. can go, which is also a kind of disadvantage, another type of ship that is often used and works very well and we are talking about certain types of cargo, they are oil tankers, obviously we use them for oil, but these do not stack containers on top like what you saw on the previous slide, but what we do is all the cargo goes to the bottom of the ship and essentially what it does is it helps serve as ballast, okay?

This of course if you run into something this could be a big problem as we hear about it almost every time there is a major oil spill. It also makes cargo very, very valuable and easy to divert small amounts of, so that's something to consider. Well, and also oil tankers tend to move slowly, so we're transporting liquids in particular, like I said, particularly crude oil from one place to another. Tankers are the way to go and there are some ways that bypass and try to reduce the likelihood of problems, so for example you will notice in our diagram that there is an empty space at the beginning, both at the front and at the back of the ship , and then there's also a double hull, that double hole, by the way, goes all the way up the sides, um, to try to make sure that, in the worst case, we're not spilling oil, also notice that the oil is in the rooms with tanks and each of those rooms has its own wall so they can actually, um, close off parts of the ship and close off access to those rooms.

Worst case scenario, you know they had a hole in the bottom of one of the rooms or something, they could limit the amount of oil coming in. Come on, so let's continue talking about other types of transportation. The next type we want to talk about are trains. By the way, my son's favorite method of transportation, and there are a lot of really good things about trains. They are relatively good. Cheap, can carry large amounts of cargo, are comparatively environmentally friendly, okay, but there are also some really bad things, so first of all, they are fixed destinations, which means trains only go where there are rails to go, so, you only go to certain places and not everywhere in the world there are roads of equal quality, and then, speaking of roads, you run into the problem of maintaining the roads, so you must maintain not only the metal rails on top but also the sleepers underneath.

You have to make sure they're not blocked since we live in the Pacific Northwest in the Puget Sound region, probably once every two three weeks, something like that. If you pay attention to the news, you'll hear the siren The train is blocked, right, Sanders, a commuter train, but the same principle applies. What happened is that there has been a landslide in the north and now the tracks are blocked, so people can't get through on the train. The same applies to the freight trains we have. To maintain the tracks we have to make sure they are clear, that they are in good condition and that trains can pass.

Another transportation method that works especially well for liquids and we mainly see it. with liquids and gases, many times oil for example, they are pipes, so if you have ever seen a pipe, that is what you see they carry, so some of the advantages that transport large amounts of cargo are relatively inexpensive . If you keep it, but you don't, you don't have a lot of labor costs or things like that that are included right there, they work very, very well for liquids and gases. Well, some of our disadvantages, of course, you have. I have fixed destinations for the pipes to go where the pipes go, and if you want to take it anywhere else, you have to put it on a different transportation method.

Well, maintaining those pipes can potentially be expensive because I know that, for example, at home. alaska with the great alaska pipeline literally during hunting season every year you hear about people who blew a hole in the pipeline and now there's oil gushing somewhere along the way so not only do they have to shut the pipeline or at least part of it they have to patch it and fix it or replace the segment, most likely they will replace it, but then they have costs in terms of the downtime they have in terms of the replacement, but they also have costs in terms of cleaning of the environment, so those are all things that need to be considered when we talk about pipes and pipe maintenance.

I'm pretty sure this is our last slide here, so we talked about shipping things by truck on the highway, this is probably the most popular way here in the US to ship things, so some of the advantages are very, very flexible, trucks can go almost anywhere, right? You see cargo trucks driving around Seattle all the time you see them on the freeway you see them in small towns especially when we talk about shorter trips it's very very fast comparatively correct and can literally get to a door in one way that trains can't and planes can't, things like that.

Why will many times the last segment of transportation be in a truck? Okay, but some of the cons: The right trucks have smaller capacities. They have the cost of gas, which fluctuates, so right now it's low, it's down to, I don't know, 250 a gallon. About here in Puget Sound last time I looked, but it could be that high, as there are points where it was actually almost over five dollars a gallon, so costs fluctuate there in a way that isn't So. If you have so many problems with some of the others, you also have the cost of the right driver and truck drivers are not cheap to pay and make a pretty decent living, and depending on how far you want them to go technically.

Everyone else can only work about eight hours a day, so if you need them to drive 10 or 12 hours now you're not only paying them for the time they spend on the road, you can also pay them for the time they spend on the road. road. Let them spend the night somewhere suitable, hotels are not cheap, paying for meals and things like that are part of the trip, so this has been our conference talking about

methods

of transportation and industrial development, some of the pros and cons that we analyze. air travel we look at trains we look at ships and container ships we talk about pipelines we talk about trucks and other vehicles and we look at what are again some of the advantages some of the disadvantages of each of those transportation methods if you have questions I'll be happy to answer them.

Please come see me with them during class and I will be happy to answer any questions you have.