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.
Comment on The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 days agoCompared to building and maintaining a railway, yes, by orders of magnitude.
mriguy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
deranger@sh.itjust.works 2 days 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 2 days 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.
twopi@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I think you’re missing the general point.
In the cases you’ve described, having automated semis would not be feasible. Automated cars already have a hard time in San Fran and AZ cities with smooth asphalt as it is.
The places where automated semis make the most sense, i.e. large, well maintained highways connecting large urban centres, can be better served with automated railways.
The engineering is much simpler, fewer degrees of freedom and a much more constrained problem space (and hence constrained solution space), for automated railways than highways. Creating a safer environment for all. Also not having to deal with semis as an individual driver.
Railways (funded through private investment): aar.org/…/AAR-Rail-Network-Map-2025-1.jpg.webp
Highways (publicly owned, operated, maintained): www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/images/nhs.pdf
There is some good coverage with railroads, but as you said not nearly extensive as the public road network. But I bet you the vast majority (above 60%) are along corridors with railways. However two big hurdles need to be overcome, greater investment in throughput capacity and the fact that trucks can go from ware house to ware house.
However both issues can be solved.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 day ago
On this I agree. For popular, well-defined routes, rail absolutely makes sense, not just for freight, but for passenger transport as well.