Urban Freight Economics: A New Rail Paradigm For Large Lots.(Statistical Data Included)

(33.) "J. Doyne Farmer, as quoted by M. Mitchell Waldrop in Complexity, (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 294.

(34.) Brian Arthur, as quoted by M. Mitchell Waldrop in Complexity, p. 333.

(35.) "The term "sub-optimization" was coined by C.J. Hitch for an article in the Journal of the Operations Research Society in 1953. It means creating rules for local optimization which preempt global optimization.

(36.) Meyer, op cit., p. 37. Service quality measures get scrambled as well as profit measures. To a customer, service quality means things like dock-to-dock transit time, frequency, standard deviation, and the availability of clean equipment. To a railroad, service quality means productivity measures like dwell time in yards, bad order ratios, and loss and damage claims. As the General Accounting Office stated in its April 1999 report Railroad Regulation, "... the railroad industry has been reluctant to develop specific service measures....In reaction to widespread criticism of rail service, however, railroads have developed four performance indicators... [which] are more an evaluation of oprating efficiency than of quality of service." (p. 66).

(37.) Nature has no such dictum. The only productivity in biology is the end-game of producing progeny. In her details, nature seems very wasteful. For example, a large percentage of the very essence of life, DNA-- probably over 50 percent of DNA in complex organisms--seems to serve no useful purpose (except perhaps as grist for favorable future mutations). The co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis H. C. Crick, was surprised by the high incidence of useless or "selfish" DNA. He wrote that "The spread of selfish DNA sequences within the genome can be compared to the spread of a not- too-harmful parasite within its host." (Nature, Vol. 284, p. 605, 17 Apr 1980, L. E. Orgel & F. H. C. Crick) Conversely, Charles Darwin noted the curiously profligate "economy" of nature. "The principle of the economy of growth...by which the materials forming any part, if not useful to the possessor, are saved as far as possible, will perhaps come into play in rendering a useless part rudimentary." (The Origin of Species, Chapter XIV).

(38.) John Walker Barriger, Super-Railroads, (NY: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1956), p.12.

(39.) Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (NY: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1981), p. 21.

(40.) Ibid., p. 35.

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