Trucks: Winnipeg-Duluth

James T. Ball, a former state highway official and later head of road construction and maintenance at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, now lives in a comfortable townhouse within a mile of the White House in Washington DC. But he has spent the whole of last winter in northern Minnesota! As part of that state’s process for gaining approval of a new toll road Ball has to gain local support from jurisdictions along the route. In Ball’s case this means 115 cities, 20 counties, and 6 Indian reservations. He is the leader of Transportation Industries International (TII) a group proposing a $1.5 billion, 322-plus mile truck toll road (a ‘truckpike’) to upgrade the heavy transportation capacity of the upper mid-west and the prairie provinces of Canada

TTI proposes an initial truck road from Proctor on the western outskirts of the Lake Superior port of Duluth about 230 miles west along the existing mainly 2 lane US-2 to near Crookston in far western Minnesota, then turning due north on a new alignment to the Canadian border. If the U.S. segment goes ahead, TII will move for permission to build a 46 miles extension in the Canadian province of Manitoba to take the truck road to Richer, which is 50 miles east of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada highway (H-1). Economic rationale for the truckway is the current high costs of transportation between the prairie lands and deep-water shipping. Canadian exports of wheat, barley, lumber and meat are almost entirely dependent on a high cost Canadian National Railways service that has to wind its way some 450 miles to the northern Lake Superior port of Thunder Bay or go all the way to Montreal. Duluth an excellent lake port is closer and favored by topography, but trucking of heavy produce is hampered by the light U.S. highway load limits of 40t compared to the Canadian 62.5t, and the poor condition of the roads to Duluth from the west. TTI proposes a truckway with a 80t weight maximum (double the present limit) and 150 foot length limit so that truckers can run long triples (with 45’ trailers) or ‘quads’ of four 28’ trailers. The truckway would be custom built for uninterrupted high speed (70 to 80 mph) operation of these long combination road trains, light vehicles being excluded. Ball says the road trains can cut freight costs drastically and improve safety for other motorists. He proposes staging areas — where the long combinations would be assembled and taken apart — at some 15 interchanges or at the ends of truck spurs built off the mainline. 40 percent of the traffic would be Canadian, 60 percent U.S. with a daily truck volume of 1,200. Tolls would be around 1.2 cents/ton-mile, generating some $100m in annual tolls. TII will try to negotiate lower truck weight limits on US-2 to discourage trucks travelling the ‘free’ road and is hoping to get a rebate of the $5m to $7m diesel fuel tax that that its customers will pay annually on fuel they use while driving the tolled truckway. He proposes the road be built with a mix of federal loan funds under ISTEA, investor equity and bonds.

Feeder spurs might later be built:

•Karlstad on the truckpike west to I-29 near Drayton ND via Donaldson and Robbin MN

•10 miles east to Thief River Falls MN

•southern bypass of Crookston 35 mls to link to I-29 south of Grand Forks ND

•south on US-71 12 ml to Kabekona, or 70 miles more southwest to Park Rapids and Detroit Lakes

•from Swan River north a few miles to Goodland, south a few miles to Jacobson

•at MN-33 (just 15 mls out of Duluth) north to Independendence then MN-53 total of 70 mls to Virginia

TII will have major wetlands mitigation along the route especially between Grand Rapids MN and Bemidji and the proposer wants to acquire 800 feet right of way and has costed the project with 17 interchanges, 14 service areas, 10 maintenance yards and 22 bypasses of towns. The initial proposal costs the truckway as 4 lanes divided at which rate it would have an estimated capacity of 11,000 truck-trains per day, about nine times the projected initial traffic. Financial advisers may suggest as a first stage of construction a single 2 lane truck roadway (probably 2x13’or 14’ lanes) which would seem to provide adequate capacity (at least 5,000 trucks/day) for many years.

A neat extension would give the road trains access to the head of the Mississippi river barge service at Stillwater near St Paul on the St Croix river:

•from Floodwood 45 miles west of Duluth this spur would run almost due south 125 mls along MN-73 to I-35 at Sandstone to Lino Lakes branching off southeast to the St Croix river at Stillwater

When he ran the 25,000 mile road system in Indian reservations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Ball was on AASHTO’s safety committee and part of the AASHTO Project 2020 exercise in longterm transportation planning. He became convinced that trucks and cars will need to be segregated on the highways of the future.

Ball told us: “There is a constant battle between AAA and ATA (American Trucking Associations) over highway truck limits, with the AAA saying bigger trucks are dangerous and the ATA saying bigger trucks are economically vital. Both are right. The AAA is right in saying trucks are dangerous and the ATA is right in saying trucks do need greater size and weight to allow economic transportation. Also it is simply uneconomic to build general purpose roads to truck standards. It is wasteful. We need to constructively work the problem by developing a special purpose heavy truckway network instead of continuing this constant political fight over general purpose roads with dangerous mixed traffic.”

Ball sees the potential of other heavy truck routes Detroit-Chicago, and Chicago-Cleveland, and as relief for congested urban freeways. He says his Winnipeg-Duluth proposal has good support so far and no real opposition. But he concedes there is some skepticism about whether he can pull off the project. Under Minnesota law only after the support of local communities is demonstrated can negotiations begin to firm up the details. (Contact: James T. Ball, President, Transportation Industries International, 202 986 5063.)•