Rail workers, enraged by policies like no sick days, could go on strike as soon as Friday if a deal isn't reached before then. The strike could upend freight & passenger rail service across the country — and send coal off the rails.
by certain policies concerning leave, such as no sick days and penalties for taking time off.
Workers could go on strike as soon as Friday if no deal is reached before then. Such a shutdown of the nation’s 7,000 daily freight trains could cost the economy as much as $2 billion per day, according to the railroad division of the Transportation Department.It would take an estimated 467,000 additional long-haul trucks per day to compensate for the freight disruption — and that’s a lot of extra pollution. Transportation is the single-largest source of U.S.
According to the Association of American Railroads, railroads are as much as four times more fuel-efficient than trucks, reducing heat-trapping emissionsEntirely replacing the nation’s trains with trucks is unlikely to happen, though. There just aren’t enough trucks or drivers to operate them. The nation’s trucking industry is short 80,000 drivers — which doesn’t bode well for the supply chain.
Still, daily train commuters whose service is interrupted by the strike may opt to drive. And despite rapid growth in recent years, electric vehicles only make up about 1 percent of cars on the road.Groups across industries are calling on Congress to intervene.