In the early part of that chart, if you look at the piece around the 1990s as opposed to what's been going on since about 2000-01, you'll see the volumes are fairly stable, but you'll see they've started to go up in the last four or five years. In the 1990s two issues were at work.
One, the competitiveness of the trucking industry was quite robust. It was quite strong. Fuel prices were still fairly low. The congestion issues and the labour issues some of the trucking industry ran into in the last few years were not as strong, so they were taking a larger share. The other very important thing is that the border was working better for the truckers, so they were taking a larger share of the overall freight market than they are today.
What's happened essentially since 9/11 is you've had a combination of rapid increases in fuel costs, congestion issues at the border, and growing congestion issues, particularly in the heavily populated areas for trucks around Toronto and Montreal, those sorts of things, combined with some difficult and growing labour shortage problems in the trucking industry. So the overall share of freight being moved by trucks has gone down in the last few years compared to what it used to be. That's been a change.
The other big change that has gone on--and this has been particularly in the last five to six years--is that the investments I referred to have started to kick in, and in combination particularly with what's gone on on the west coast as a result of the growth of the Asian trade, that has led to that increase in volume from the latter part of the period. So you've had a combination of things.
This is an overall chart, so it doesn't look very dramatic, but it's been pretty dramatic.