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We compared land transport options for getting to net zero. Hands down, electric rail is the best.
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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Thanks for posting this. We knew this for a long time, didn't we? How did Trucks ever win out in long range land-based transport?
Massive subsidies.
Railroads have to pay to maintain the tracks they run on. They also have to pay property tax for owning the rails and land.
Trucks run on public highways that the government pays for. Trucks do pay taxes, but not nearly as much as they would need to to cover the wear they cause to the roads.
If all freight had to fully fund their own infrastructure, overland cargo would be almost exclusively carried by rail, even more so if they had to cover the damages of their carbon and particulate emissions.
To add to this for people who don't know, road wear scales at a power of 4 with the weight.
So if a vehicle is 2x as heavy it causes 16x as much damage to the road
The average car weighs approximy 4000 lbs.
The ford f-150 is about 5000 lbs, which causes 2.4 times the road wear as the average car.
A big rig with no trailer weighs about 20,000 lbs, which causes 625 times the road wear as the average car.
An truck with an empty trailer weighs 30,000 lbs, causing 3,200 times the road wear as the average car.
A truck with a medium load weighs about 55,000 lbs, which causes 36,000 times the road wear.
A truck operating at the federal weight limit of 80,000 lbs causes 160,000 times the road wear as the average car.
But it gets worse. The average car driver drives 13,000 miles per year. Long haul trucks drive an average of 100,000 miles per year. They are commercial vehicles driving during most of a workday. Trucks drive 8 times further.
In comparison to the average car, a truck hauling medium loads causes around 288,000 times more road wear than a normal passenger car.
Trucks cost more to register than passenger cars, they pay slightly more in tax, but nowhere near the 288,000 times they should.
Trucks are economonically viable entirely due to the massive subsidies they get for being grossly undercharged for the roads they run on.
Edit: On reflection my numbers are probably too high, and extrapolating the available studies to big rigs is probably unreasonable. Trucks have per axle/tire weight limits. Bigger trucks have more axles. A truck with twice the weight distributed across twice the number of wheels will probably be closer to twice the wear than what I predicted. Not enough to negate the conclusion, but real numbers are probably not quite as high as I predicted.
Part of the other problem of trucks is they go across many borders, from cities to countries, but are not paying taxes for each specific road. This means a truck from Country A can pay the majoirty of its taxes to country A, despite spending more of its time on country B roads.
In most of Europe you need to pay a fee to drive on public roads, sometimes only motorways
There are some toll roads in north america. Mostly motorways or bridges. People pay a registration to put their car on the road and pay taxes on gas. Many assume this covers their share of the cost of the road and don't realize that driving is massively subsidized.
Throw that in there with factory farming, fossil fuels, airlines, and a bunch of other things that the government shovels money into.
Adding to your edits, you have to divide the weight by the number of tires before raising it to the 4th power then you multiply that new number by the number of tires. That will give you more accurate numbers
Electric cars come to mind.
With current technology, an EV might be expected to be 20% heavier than a comparable ICE car. 1.2^4 = 2. Twice the road west might look like a lot, until you realize just how much road wear is dominated by bigger vehicles. The neighbor in the bro-dozer that’s twice as heavy, so sixteen times the road wear. Then again that one semi driving by wearing the road like thousands of cars, and that’s before you count the fixed axle rear wheels destroying the pavement as the tires move laterally on turns.
While an EVs weight is technically a problem for road wear and we do need to work on it, it’s far dwarfed by existing overly large vehicles. We have bigger things to worry about. Literally, in this case.
Big vehicles do cause damage for sure. Does the frequency of repeated force caused by the exponentially larger number of EVs on the road year over year cause roads to wear out faster though? If so, it seems like cause for more than a shrug of concern.
I do agree it’s an issue, but it’s a smaller issue than the ever ending creasing adoption of full sized trucks for personal use, and both are smaller impact than semis. I'm all for efficiency standards that encourage reduced vehicle weight. I’m all for weight based tolls or taxes so all vehicles pay a more fair share of the damage they do. But it’s disingenuous to blame EVs
Fair! Not blaming them fwiw.
NAZIs, I guess?
(No, seriously: Nazi Germany invented Autobahns to help blitzkrieg tactics, then Eisenhower saw the strategic advantage and copied them to create the Interstate Highway System, then everyone else copied the US.)
While the Nazi's rolled out the Autobahn, it had little to no military significance. Interior movements biased trains to reduce fuel costs. And how exactly would an interior road help a blitzkrieg tactic into another country?
By bringing quickly the men and resources needed at the border with little to no time for the defenders to prepare?
Okay. But wouldn't a road to the border be something thats guarded? Seems like if you want to sneak attack your enemy you would choose a less obvious route, like through the woods or placing a military bridge across a river, rather than down a road to the border.
I don't know I have only a limited experience in invading foreign nations.
No they didn't, they took credit for the previous administration: https://www.dw.com/en/the-myth-of-hitlers-role-in-building-the-autobahn/a-16144981