this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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The easy, low-cost solution is to build freight rail. But no, that's communism and it doesn't get a tech billionaire their extra billion.
I wouldn't call effective rail infrastructure "low-cost".
compared to highways? absolutely low-cost.
highways are a lot cheaper than railways
How many private road networks exist in the US?
The problem is a lot of the costs of highways are externalized: cars are more expensive to run than trains, parking is more space costly, roads require dedicating much larger amounts of space for lower capacity. The reality is car roads cost more but are subsidized more.
The cost to construct a new rail connection is significantly higher than the cost to construct a new road connection. Subsidies don't enter into it.
If somebody says they have an easy and low cost solution for you, you'd be annoyed if it turned out that it was actually far harder and pricier until maybe 50 years down the line.
Correct. Now compare the cost of maintenance, and then compare the cost of actually moving the items.
Let's see which comes out on top when we compare all costs, not just the cost of building.
rail lines are also more expensive than roads to maintain
the cost of moving your items depends entirely on how many items you move—sometimes roads will be cheaper, and sometimes rails will be cheaper
That's because they transport more material than roads.
The NZ government did a thought experiment where they shifted all rail to road, and the maintenance costs would increase by $105 million.
Keep in mind the rail system in NZ is underdeveloped.
Source: https://www.kiwirail.co.nz/assets/Uploads/documents/2021-Value-of-Rail-report.pdf
If you want to shift the most materials from one place to another at the cheapest rate, you would use rail.
Do you mean cost to the end consumer or actual expenditure? Are you including CAPEX? What are you actually talking about?
Maybe consider different framing: If 50 years ago we had budgeted as much public money on public railroads as roads, we'd be in a much better position today and its even more likely this trend will continue.
but that wasn't the case, so increasing rail use is going to be expensive and difficult
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost
for railways it's 1-2 million by most estimates, of course land acquisition has to be talen into account too but that's true for roads too.
then there are the efficiency and maintaince costs. first of all if you are building tracka you can electrify it right away meaning you have a very green mode of transporting both people and cargo.
and efficiency wise google says trains are 3-4x more efficient than trucks (semis)
you also have to consider the electrification of trucks, if you need trucks to go across the country to hail stuff, eiher they need large batteries, which is more weight and thus more wear and tear on the roads or you need to maintain an extremely inefficient Hydrogen ecosystem which has 30% or so efficiency compared to the 85-90% of BEVs.
wouldn't it make more sense to havw smaller semis with less range and thus smaller batteries that just hauls stuff in the final miles? from the cargo train depot to the intended destination?
Cheaper than highways. The reason why long haul trucking exists is because the construction of highways is highly subsidized. Even then, it's often more cost effective to use rail.
railways are a lot more expensive than roadways per km
Citation needed
I'm not that guy, and I'm all for rail, but here's an article that talks about it. https://seattletransitblog.com/2009/10/26/the-highway-vs-fixed-transit-debate/
"While a few rail-transit lines may have had a marginal effect on rush-hour congestion, the cost is exorbitant. The average light-rail line under construction or in planning stages today costs $25 million per mile ($50 million per mile in both directions). Heavy rail costs more than twice as much. By comparison, the average lane mile of freeway costs only about $5 to $10 million."
But the average freeway is not 1-lane, but has many lanes. Also roadways have much higher maintenance costs than rail.
Rail maintenance is more expensive than road maintenance
Where can I find those figures in the post you linked?
I might be mistaken, but by that quote and given that every motorway has three lanes in each direction, or at least two I assume in the USA, the cost of the road is at least comparable and at most a bit dearer. I'd even say it constitutes fudging the numbers to pull the wool over.
Only if you compare 3 roads to 1 track. If you're arguing about which costs more then it doesn't make sense to include the cost of the whole 3 lanes as all that traffic doesn't need to go by rail.
Well, the difference is that three lanes of traffic have about the same capacity for passengers as a single railway track, no?
I wonder if these high costs are due to it being passenger rail inside a major city. I'm curious if this cost applies to freight rail as well.
Out here in the countryside it seems that a mile of freight rail should be worth much less than a mile of highway. Everything from easement size to site prep, equipment needed and bill of materials seems a fraction of that required for highway construction.
As mentioned elsewhere the maintenance is minimal compared to a highway as well, with the trains plowing snow themselves and the rails being very hard-wearing. The only work we ever see them doing on the rail lines is occasionally replacing sleepers and fixing up the road crossings - and it's heavy trucks that ruin those, not the trains.
Yeah, I'd definitely be curious on more detailed numbers.
This is about light rail though, which is usually built in cities (or, at least between a city and its suburbs). So I wonder how much of the cost (for both rail and road) is for land rights.
I know that asking you to Google things is maybe a lot, but isn't the answer pretty obvious if you think about it for more than five seconds?
Roads are made out of what would otherwise be a waste product from refining oil, mixed with dirt. If you just leave it alone, it will basically just sit there.
Rails are made out of steel, which is both expensive and rusts. Tolerances have to be tight. And if you fuck about with maintenance in rail, you get a train derailment.
Idk why you got down voted. It makes sense to me!
Because people don't want facts and accurate information they want their team to win.
No, it's because your answer is overly simplistic. We don't build one lane roads, we tend to build 3 or 4 in each direction, at least in cities.
Also, leave a road alone, it does not just sit there. In cold climates you get frost heaves, in hot climates asphalt is never truly "solid" so it gets ruts... water causes damage, plants grow through it...
Add in some of the other responses and we have a more complete picture. I'm not convinced. At best it might be a wash.
*edit* just realized you're not the same person, sorry. My point still stands though.
They build roads going every direction because people and stuff needs to go every direction, people still need to go to those places if you replace them with trains.
Also the effort to fix and replace train lines is far more than fixing roads, I think a lot of Americans haven't really used trains much so they don't comprehend how complex it is, when you've had trains cancelled for a thousand dumb reasons like the wrong kind of leaves on the track then trains don't feel as reliable - and when the track is blocked for repair they can't go round so it's bus replacement service so if you scrap roads then you need redundancy so you end up with masses of tracks everywhere.
I love trains but people need to learn how they actually work and the costs involved so we can be reasonable in planning and build the most useful solution for each situation - just saying trains for everything doesn't make sense.
I wouldn't exactly call removing nature and laying down the track "easy" either. That's tens of thousands of miles of steel carving through the terrain.
Also, we have a ton of rail, it's just prioritized for freight over passenger transit. A high speed passenger rail network would be nice though.
compared to a 5 lane highway its a pittance - theres a reason why private rail companies can exist but private road companies largely don't.
The problem is there's a lot more federal funding for the shittier solution so when budgetting are you going to build the thing the feds will pay 100% or 0%?
why would a private company pay for a new road when the government will build that infrastructure for them? and even if they would, why on earth would they build a 5 lane highway solely for private use?
in either case, a rail line is still more expensive than a highway
thats the thing though, a rail line can pay for itself, a road often can't. Its easy to "create a new branch road" but when you add in all the externalized maintenance factors: policing traffic, emergencies, fueling stations, stormwater management, the costs per user, the costs per user per mile traveled, land use requirements per user (4 parking stalls per vehicle, multiple vehicles per person) etc.
They often cannot pay for themselves, hence why the subsidies are necessary and why things like big box stores with huge parking lots are a net drain on most communities (its not just the low wages)
If they could pay for themselves we'd see more companies that just build and rent private roads like train companies do.
"* all of the factors you just listed also apply to railways"
"* since railways are more expensive to construct and maintain than roadways, there are more cases in which a railway couldn't pay for itself versus a roadway"
"* why would a company build a private road when the government will do it for them?"
I'm mostly just responding to your points, but if I'm trying to make any argument its that mile per mile train infrastructure is cheaper than road infrastructure when you add up all of the costs, especially the ones people normally dont consider including vehicle maintinance, extra land and infrastructure for parking, more policing, gas, time wasted on longer commutes, ect. I'm also trying to point out that the reason we can't have nice things is because we have chosen the wrong priorities as a society, thats why we are stuck in a loop where we try to solve our car problems with more cars and car infrastructure instead of addressing the root cause of the problem.
it's kind of an agenda pushing shit to compare high speed rail with highways, high speed railroads compete with airplanes not cars, on a regular track you can reach 150km/h easily and those cost a fraction and that's already more than the 130km/h limit of highways in Europe
German HSR trains go about 250km/h on regular and over 350km/h on HSR-specific tracks
it's also dishonest to insist that every road you build needs to be a four lane highway, so i thought it about averaged out