Moving Freight on the Road.

About a third of all strawberries in

the United States come from one area, Watsonville, California. When you think about
it, it's really far
away from New Jersey, over 3000 miles. Yet, when I walk down to
my local grocery store, and I look at the strawberries, what do I see? Yeah,
Watsonville,
it says Watsonville right here, and this is over 3,000 miles away from here. How do
they get there? Well, a lot of it has to do with trucks,
lots and lots of trucks. And strawberries have to be refrigerated
so they'd better move fast. That is what we're
going to talk about today. Motor freight and why it is so important. When we
consider motor freight,
it has several advantages. Speed, it's very fast. Reliability, trucks rarely break
down,
and if they do, it's only for a very short amount of time. Three, items do not get
damaged very often. And fourth,
trucks can pretty much get anywhere. There's a road, a truck can drive on it. And
when we talk about the other
modes of transportation, I want you to keep in mind these
advantages that trucking has. Motor freight is also very
efficient in a financial sense. Because the roadways are paid for
by the government and ultimately the taxpayers,
it's a subsidized industry. Most of the cost is in fuel, wages,
maintenance, equipment, and user charges. Not all trucks are the same. We need city
trucks, usually smaller
vehicles that can make it inside of a congested city without a trailer. We load
stuff in the back. Then we have line haul-vehicles,
and they come in different sizes. The most common ones are 40 foot
containers that are used often for international shipments and intermodal. The
other one is 53 foot containers which
are very popular in the United States and Canada. In addition, we have specialty
vehicles, such as refrigerator,
our strawberries have to come on those, livestock containers,
automobile carriers, and tankers. When we use different trucks,
we connect them with terminals. Terminals are taking
products from one truck, sorting them, and
then moving them out on a different truck. We're not storing the items
in these terminals, even though often they
look like warehouses. There are three types of terminals. We have pickup and
delivery terminals where we go from
a city truck to a line-hall vehicle. Then we have cross docks where we connect
networks of transportation together. And finally, we have relay terminals,
where we just switch out the cab and put a trailer on a new cab, so
we have a fresh driver and we move away.