Canadian Freight Way

Canadian Freight Way

Canadian Trucking industryCanadian freight movement is big business; just sit beside the Trans-Canada Highway and count the number of trucks that pass in one hour! One might suppose that the number of trucks is increasing year by year, but those suppositions may be based on faulty reasoning. No one can argue that the ratio of trucks to cars on the road at any given time is high, but figured into the equation are the facts that truckers generally travel for many more hours and over much longer distances than the average car. The same truck counted in Halifax, Nova Scotia will be counted in Edmunston, New Brunswick a few hours later, Montreal a day later, and Calgary a week after that.

Cars far outnumber trucks by about 27 to one, and the number of automobiles is increasing steadily, while trucks seem to maintain roughly the same number. The extra congestion that is sometimes blamed on trucking is most often caused by the number of cars competing for the same space on our highways and city streets.

The Canadian method of transporting freight falls almost exclusively to trucks. Trains and planes do a share of it, but it is ultimately trucks that pick up the load for delivery. The same semi that carries a trailer load of goods would need a large fleet of cars or pickup trucks to transport the same load. It is so much more efficient to employ the large vehicles that are built to handle all types of freight, including machinery, lumber, fuels, toxic chemicals, dry goods, and refrigerated items.

The Canadian freight way of supplying our manufacturing, import, export and consumer needs has been and will remain for the foreseeable future, trucking, in its many forms and services.

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