this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
314 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
69702 readers
3299 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Probably could have built a lot of rail for the cost of R&D on self-driving semis...
I'm not so sure. Infrastructure is hella expensive and the US government already maintains the highways that make trucking make sense.
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.
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 (40^4) / (2^4), which means your 40-ton lorry does as much damage as 160,000 cars.
Thank you for the correction! I remembered incorrectly.
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.
Maybe 2 or 3 single rail lines across the country.
You guys gotta remember that the US is double the size of the entire EU. I will say that I don't disagree in that more rail would be nice, but you have to think about this logically.
Oh I do, it's where I live. At current costs its about $1.6m(1) per mile, so yea, agreed, probably not much. Will have to check back in 5 years after we see the costs to operate and lawsuits from accidents 😆
how about historically? we had rail, and it was great. Most of it was ripped up at the behest of auto manufacturers.
It was mostly the street car systems that got ripped up, not the stuff that carries freight.
trams were the biggest casualty, but not the only.
Tram! That's the word I was looking for...