Comment on The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day agoI’m not so sure. Infrastructure is hella expensive and the US government already maintains the highways that make trucking make sense.
jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 1 day ago
Not necessarily. A 40 tonne lorry damages the motorway as much as 1000 passenger cars. It will lead to the state having to renew the road surfaces every few years. Rails don’t have that problem, they’ll happily take 100 tonnes for decades.
futatorius@lemm.ee 15 hours ago
According to an old and well-attested empirical formula, road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. So if we make the pessimistic assumption that those passenger cars weigh 2 tons (pretend they’re all SUV-sized EVs), then the damage ratio is on the order of (404)/(24), which means your 40-ton lorry does as much damage as 160,000 cars.
jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 14 hours ago
Thank you for the correction! I remembered incorrectly.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
The point I’m making is that the government has already decided to maintain the highways, so continuing on is the status quo. If they wanted to make new railroads they’d have to expend political capital to get anything new funded.