Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
Now look at trucks (18 wheelers) and try to decide if they're cheaper than trains when factoring in infrastructure maintenance.
A big part of this is about who pays for the infrastructure. In the US at least, most roads are paid for by the public whilst railways are paid for by the company that owns them. To make matters worse, while the cost of making a 13 lane highway is externalized, many states charge taxes per track mile, which incentivizes single-tracking.
Essentially what you end up with is that if you're sending goods by train, you're paying for both the maintenance of the train tracks and the roads the trucks use, whereas if you send them by truck you're only paying for the road maintenance. This is a direct government policy that selects for trucking over rail, despite the inefficiency.
I was an over the road trucker for a bit, and this was one of the first things that struck me. Going through Chicago is a literal river of trucks 24/7. Absolutely no reason 90%+ couldn't be a train. Just fucking embarrassing really. We let the money management bros into the train system and this is what we get.
It's not a literal river
Figuratively literal means figuratively. It’s even in the dictionary now, sad to say