Don't post images of text. Just link to the article ffs
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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According to this math the entire population of the Netherlands has to bike on one single road more than 80 times to create the same amount of damage as one truck…
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
Where bicycles typically ride, it is likely a greater discrepancy.
Unsurprisingly, it's more complicated than that, but...
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The literature found a range of damage law exponents from 1 to 12
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On average, state highways...should consider using a damage law exponent of approximately 2; however, designing for the heaviest commercial vehicles operating on local low-volume roads with a lower life would need to consider a damage law exponent closer to 6.
So what would be the difference between a typical sedan and one of the monstrosity truck & SUV things rolling out lately?
Monster truck with the extra big knobby tires? Or regular production monster truck?
More wheel surface area probably reduces this somewhat. I suspect that it's the fourth power of the pressure, with the number of axles being used as a proxy for this.
It's probably still well over four orders of magnitude, mind you.
I'm going to guess it's even more since they rounded up the the nearest tenth. An ebike is closer to 0.04 tonnes. A regular bike is closer to 0.02 tonnes. So probably above 300,000.
I'm pretty sure you need to include the people riding the bikes too, since they weigh more than the bikes.
All while the bus damages the road as bad as a few thousand cars.
Its also only a partial story as "damage done" doesn't directly relate to actual costs.
Take Ottawa as an example
Transitway is nothing but buses all day long, and that has an amortized annual cost of $42,100 per lane/km/year.
A local road that sees a couple hundred car trips a day costs $14,122 per lane/km/yr.
So that's 3× the capital cost for way way way more vehicles at 1-3,000x the "damage" per vehicle.
Bicycle lanes an amortized captial cost of around $5-1000 per lane/km/year (this number is REALLY hard to peg down due to all the different ways cities account for bike infrastructure and the type of infrastructure it is).
So a bike lane is somewhere between 14 to 3000x less expensive than a local road, despite 160,000x less "damage"
