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This highlights an issue with trains. Why are building robot trucks cheaper than getting competition in the rail market?
(Roads are largely free to use and public, versus near monopolies on rail track use.)
Roads go everywhere you want to go, and it’s worth sending a truck for a much smaller load than a train
This isn't about last mile trucking though, this is about long-haul trucking.
That said, considering trains are getting longer and longer and with fewer and fewer employees on board, I'm not sure that even more freight by rail is a good solution either.
The rail industry would be much better off being better regulated and with large rail companies broken up.
Definitely, but even then, we have a huge amount of freight going on our railroads. I live in a town that's a major cross-point for multiple railroads. Traffic is held up constantly by super long trains going through. Kids are late for school, people are late for work, people miss doctor's appointments and, worse, ambulances have to take circuitous routes to the couple of overpasses they can use to get around them. And then there are the times where a train breaks down just outside of town and cuts off one side of town from the other for hours except for those two overpasses.
I don't know what the solution is there.
The issue is with how we prioritize rail. When grade crossings are installed, they are the least path of resistance, but also are the biggest obstacle in planning. If we really want to see better rail, we need to pay for the infrastructure (ie, elevated crossings). That’s not to say every route needs the best infrastructure, but at least the busiest.
The other issue is how 150 years ago we gave railroads incredible handouts of land ownership, not just in terms of the amount of land, but also in terms of the type of ownership. In a lot of cases, railroads have more sovereignty over their land than do the local and state jurisdictions it runs through. If you're a city trying to improve a railroad crossing and the railroad doesn't feel like cooperating, you're just fucked with zero recourse.
The solution is to make freight rail companies run on timetables again with shorter trains.
Would shorter trains be able to make up for the lack of cargo in trucks?
You need to run more trains, but a schedule will make it easier to hire qualified people to do so.
A lot of what has made current freight rail shitty in the USA is that a lot of freight rail companies seem hyper fixated on only the most profitable routes at the exclusion of everything else. This has caused freight rail companies to adopt some really terrible labor practices, which has led to labor shortages.
But how many trains is more trains? Because you're talking about enough trains to make up for the loss of thousands upon thousands of trucks from the road. That sounds a hell of a lot more than, say, one train an hour. In fact, it sounds like people would be held up at crossings constantly.
One train per hour would be on the very high side. It would likely be a lot less.
Why would it be a lot less? I just looked it up and there are 13.86 million trucks on the road in the US. How many cars would a train need to make up for that in a once-per-hour schedule over a 24-hour period?
While it may be more efficient (in time, energy, labor) to have something make most of its long haul journey on a train, I have to think that the time between "I need to send this" and "it is moving" is much shorter with trucking than with trains.
There’s also an article somewhere around here about an attempted renaissance in shipping. They headlined the Great Lakes, but included that Chicago could be a hub connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system- together those cover a huge portion of the US
Might not be the best idea either considering the Mississippi was so low in 2022 that barges got grounded.
Pretty much answering your last paragraph: Relevant John Oliver segment
Roads go anywhere you build them.
Rails go anywhere you build them.
Roads are a lot more flexible though. Tractors also use roads for example. As to bicycles and pedestrians.
Note that the above is about very rural areas where seeing 4 of the above per hour on any stretch is busy. As you start scaling up density it makes sense to separate uses, and trains quickly become the best option for various reasons.
The best option is what Europe has been trying to do by decoupling track ownership from companies running the trains. However, that would likely mean a government takeover of all tracks.
Just do it
It’s weird to me that a company can own a train line which cuts though the country and needs maintenance. Like imagine if they owned roads…
Oh, that's been happening in some parts of the world. Well, at least highways.