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.
Comment on The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business
jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 1 day agoNot 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.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
futatorius@lemm.ee 10 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 9 hours ago
Thank you for the correction! I remembered incorrectly.