intermodal

The wikipedia article on intermodal transport suggests close to 70% of intermodal goes on railroads in the US[0].

San Francisco once had such an intermodal transit hub in the Transbay Terminal; the city is seeking $2.5 Billion to rebuild it.

Service level competition with unbundling is very real and creates a quantifiable consumer surplus even without intermodal competition.

But as below comments mention, generally steel intermodal containers make pretty poor livable areas for a variety of reasons.

I would counter that the best start is short-haul intermodal: trucks that pick up a container and haul it to an intermodal rail yard, and so on.

They move the containers out of the port on trucks, to intermodal terminals inland where they get switched to trains.

If basic income ever became a reality, my first startup business would be factory-manufactured housing units that fit inside intermodal shipping containers.

Hunt [1] and even UPS [2] now make use of intermodal shipping.

What's stopping intermodal containers being used to displace the long-distance trucking?

If you can get a fix to a warehouse you're OK but once the pallets go into an intermodal shipping container and stacked, you're SOL.

I'm thinking things that are intermodal freight, like a container of TV's bound for a CostCo in San Diego, shipped from Long Beach.

I remember the pictures of intermodal containers for explaining this.

And what's really funny is that the "container" metaphor explains this well -- and I had spent time reading up on the history of physical, intermodal containers and how they changed our global economy to boot.

) "One TEU represents the cargo capacity of a standard intermodal container, 20 feet (6.1 m) long and 8 feet (2.44 m) wide.[1] There is a lack of standardisation in regards to height, ranging between 4 feet 3 inches (1.30 m) and 9 feet 6 inches (2.90 m), with the most common height being 8 feet 6 inches (2.59 m)." So just the cooling for this thing will be more than 1 shipping container in size.

Intermodal transport (which includes those loooooooong double-stack trains you often see) is primarily finished goods going to market.

In writing Intermodal, I've had to muck around with some of the guts of Rails.

I have already sent them an email begging them to steal ideas from Intermodal.