Oh. But a road is famously cheap.
Comment on The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business
catloaf@lemm.ee 11 months agoIt’s absurd to suggest running a railway to every warehouse in East Bumfuck, Missouri.
deur@feddit.nl 11 months ago
catloaf@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Compared to building and maintaining a railway, yes, by orders of magnitude.
mriguy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A road built and maintained by taxpayers is much cheaper (to a shipping company) than building, maintaining, and operating a railway. Making taxpayers responsible for the infrastructure you use is one way to make your business much more profitable.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Citation needed
A cursory search shows rail in rural areas is $2 million per mile and a highway is $4-10 million per mile.
catloaf@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Yeah but it’d be fucking insane to build a state highway to each and every destination in every hamlet, just like it would be for rail.
And it’s not just cost of initial construction, it’s also cost of maintenance. If the ground shifts slightly under the road, it’s a bump. If it shifts under a railway, it’s a derailment for the first train that finds it and a couple million dollars in recovery and repair, plus the downtime while that section is out of service. And that doesn’t even start to account for overhead like signal operation, whereas on a road you just use a stop sign.
I like trains more than the next guy, but you absolutely cannot just replace every road with a railway.
bizzle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The road already exists
al_Kaholic@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
Just one more road and the traffic will get better /s
drmoose@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No one’s claiming that. Trucks can still handle the last mile just like they do it with container ships.
Im no logistics expert byt ship -> train -> semi sounds like a great infrastructure design especially now as the container is interchangeable between all of these mediums.