“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
An Action Plan for Rail Industry Growth in Service to All Stakeholders
Half-page SRF Background and half-page OTNA Background
RE-SEED, Rail Enabled Sustainable Environment and Economic Development
Why is now the time for a comprehensive freight rail growth strategy?
Environmental issues, increasing road congestion and costs, and battered public sector budgets present an opportune time for railroads to align their business models with the continent's best interests.
Railroads are vital to North America’s economic growth and environmental stability. Railroads are:
Environmentally efficient
Capital efficient
Space efficient
Railroads in North America are a $100 billion-a-year industry, while trucking is a $1 trillion-a-year industry. The growth opportunity for rail is immense.
Investors, infrastructure funds, and shippers will provide ample capital for this growth strategy, which aligns with the urgent need for sustainable supply chains worldwide.
Projects, companies, communities, and investors will enjoy a higher return on investment as part of a growing rail industry.
Why does the rail industry need a new approach? (All solvable!)
It is content with long-term incremental growth while losing market share with no discernable industry-wide growth strategy.
Given railroads' inherent contribution to addressing public sector concerns, it has a mismatched approach to government relations.
It has a defensive approach to community relations that misses the opportunity to inspire a groundswell of support for railroads.
It has a weak relationship with capital providers compared to industries with less resilience, importance, and opportunity.
It is slow to adopt new technologies or technologies proven effective outside North America.
It has not been facile at the level of collaboration needed to work effectively with other critical stakeholder groups.
It has suffered from labor-management relations that are hurtful to all sides.
More than 90% of industrial properties are developed as truck-served only.
Landowners, developers, and shippers are challenged to address the complexity of rail logistics and infrastructure.
Borrowing the required capital for rail infrastructure is more challenging than land and facilities.
Many economic development agencies are inadequately trained in rail-enabled economic development.
Despite its inherent efficiencies, it is not reaching its potential for leading the continent to freight system sustainability.
What new approaches will forward growth?
After years of losing market share to trucks, railroads now have an enormous opportunity to recapture volume and drive meaningful growth if they adopt a comprehensive growth strategy.
Better government relations will drive additional public sector investment in railroads, and supportive policies.
The key is collaboration and letting go of the outdated expectation that competition is an appropriate driver of commerce and governance.
Rail projects will attract more investment when thoughtfully conceived to support entire supply chains and industrial systems.
Adopting new technologies, or those proven effective overseas will bring innovation, safety improvements, and productivity gains to North American railroads.
Building positive relationships with shippers, carriers, governments, and other stakeholders will deliver enormous benefits and open new growth paths.
More collaborative and positive approaches to labor management will attract thousands of new workers, offsetting retirements in a difficult hiring market.
Railroads are an efficient and cost-effective way to move freight. Changing the way railroads do business will help everyone achieve their sustainability goals.
What stakeholder groups do we want contributing to the intelligence and progress of RE-SEED?
What are the stakeholder sectors that comprise do we catalog stakeholder groups into?
What has OnTrackNorthAmerica positioned to accelerate this growth?
Regional and corridor infrastructure planning, AutoDesk
Statewide and multi-state freight and rail planning, AECOM
State Freight Advisory Committees
IntelliSynthesis
North American Freight Forum-what technology company, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, go thru Matt Rose or Gil Lamphere, Act
Unparalleled cataloging of 30,000 relevant stakeholders across the industrial, political, and geographic landscape
What has Strategic Rail Finance positioned to accelerate RE-SEED?
Collaborative Industrial Optimization
GIS-Enabled way of thinking and designing sustainable industry and communities
Applied economic and demographic data analysis
How proper investment leads to multiple growth opportunities
OnTrack Industrial Properties Project
Collateral and Financial Engineering
Strategic Rail Bank, guy in Nevada, Jeff Steilgelman
Strategic Rail Fund, Bon French, Macquarie
Rail Customer Funding
What relations
Amit conversation
A commercially-viable, sustainable industrial systems approach.
How should we relate to how our dialogue needs to be kept quiet?
Who would you suggest we interact with?
We are inventing new designs in the fundamental game pieces of the relationship among government agencies, businesses, academia, researchers, and consulting firms. That is the RFQs, RFIs, RFPs, Proposals, Contracts, Work Scopes, Reports, Action Plans.
What is the ideal use that we want the datahub to fulfill
If we have this geospatial continental hub that aggregates information, within that we would be abel to reun analysis as to where
Improve rail
Identity and design network expansion
Design industrial systems
waste
What are the ability factors of various user groups that we want to design our tool and training program to address?
What are the continent’s natural resources that we want to map?
How are we going to do that?
How has data been gathered to date by the relevant stakeholder groups?
What assistance can be provided to early stage data sufferers so that they can bring their data system into optimal alignment with this initiative?
What level of governments are best involved with the aggregation for each geo-level of data?
What are the time factors for each step in this initiative?
What data format would make the process of gathering data from
What key industrial systems in the state are most important to map?
What is the current state of GIS Data gathering in each county?
Topics, subjects, phrases
You think and write in questions, and in order?
How can RE-SEED assist government in addressing policy shortcomings?
