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!
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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.
This is why I think large companies with lots of trucking should be paying a lot more taxes for roads and bridges. As it stands now, ordinary citizens are subsidizing them while they turn around and raise prices off the back of this. Corporate welfare for nothing in return
But you're not even paying that. You're only directly paying the vehicle tax on the truck, its fuel and amortized operation and maintenance costs. But the vehicle tax doesn't even come close to covering the cost of the damage the truck causes to the road infrastructure. You pay the difference indirectly in other taxation that is a subsidy to the trucking industry, and also taxation that subsidizes the fossil-fuel industry.
So the bias against rail transport is even greater than you indicate.