Trucks drive on roads paid for by taxpayers and gas taxes paid by car drivers.

Rail is paid for by the rail traffic.

Hence the gross distortion of financial incentives.

As for why it is inefficient:

1. one truck driver per load vs one train driver per 50 (or whatever) loads

2. one engine per load vs one engine per 50 loads

3. steel wheels are far more efficient than tires

4. no rubber dust pollution from steel wheels

5. truck damage to freeways is enormous, but is not paid by trucks. rail is built to handle heavy loads, and is much easier/cheaper to maintain

6. trains are far more fuel efficient per load than trucks

> Rail is paid for by the rail traffic.

I am very skeptical of this. If this is true, it makes rail the only transit mode not subsidized by the government. Do you have a source for this?

Depends how far back you wanna go. In Canada, in exchange for building, the railways got free land in every downtown and port, and along their lines. Along with 100% royalty-free surface and mineral rights.

> 1881: Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) began construction of the railway from Winnipeg to B.C. In exchange for building the railroad, CPR was granted 25 million acres of land. These lands included the petroleum and natural gas rights.

> 1882: CPR was able to select lands from the odd numbered sections in a belt of land 24 miles wide on each side of the CPR railway rights. This created a checkerboard pattern, still widely used in the industry today to describe the lands. Where lands were deemed unfit for settlement, CPR negotiated for other lands that were often far from railway construction.

> 1883: CPR began drilling for water in hope of improving the land’s suitability for settlement. While drilling for water, Alberta’s first natural gas was discovered, Langevin No. 1.

https://www.prairiesky.com/history/

In US, passenger rail is subsidized, but freight rail is not. Freight rail in the US is a healthy industry, with steady revenues and profits.

The original construction of the rail lines in the 19th century was heavily subsidized (free land, etc).

But ongoing maintenance is not, and the same does not hold for highway maintenance.

In fact, railroads pay property taxes in some states, so they actually bear even more cost than competing modes of transportation.

The rail lines were obliged to in return carry the mail for free. That turned out to be a darned good deal for the government.

Trucks pay "Heavy Vehicle Use Tax" or HVUT

The damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

Take a look at this chart:

https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

and this article

https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...

From the article:

"Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)"

Even taking into account the number of axles, say, five on the lorry and two on the car we have 2 000 pounds per axle for the car and 16 000 pounds per axle for the lorry. That is a factor of eight, 8^4 is 4096, still a large number.

To elaborate on why this doesn't bridge the gap between heavy trucking road wear and all other traffic, road wear primarily comes down to environmental causes and impact loading. Wear from impact loading scales with IIRC roughly the 4th power of axle weight. The ruts you see in asphalt aren't from wearing through the surface, it's from slowly deforming it due to cyclic loading slowly shifting the subsurface and road surface on top. That basically doesn't happen with any vehicle that doesn't require a CDL.

As a counterpoint the environmental wear is basically inevitable and in colder climates that's going to dominate the road work schedule anyways so it doesn't matter as much. Even with freeze thaw wrecking the road heavy loads still shorten the life of the road surface.

Any way you slice it though, the current taxes and fees that heavy trucks pay do not come close to covering the share of maintenance work they're responsible for. Gas taxes effectively subsidize the trucking industry.

That's 100-550$. Peanuts compared to the actual cost.

Generally rail + last mile truck is cheaper. It takes longer however, which increases capital costs: goods stay in container for longer, so you need more of it to fill the ‘longer’ pipeline so to speak. And there is the issue of economics, the owner of the container is generally the shipping line, which will give you a relatively short time to deliver the container empty again after pick up in the port. This is called the detention time. After the detention period you pay extremely high fees per extra day the container is in use. The incentives of the shipping line are very much not aligned with that of the receiver of cargo: the shipping line wants their container back in stock asap, the receiver wants the cheapest hinterland transport.

In addition to the other replies, we haven't built new rail lines in a long time. Some of them are at capacity. Some trains leaving Seattle must go through Portland instead of heading straight east.

The Seattle metro area has eagerly ripped up and paved over every rail line it could find during my decades of living here. The area used to have an extensive network of rail - all gone, now.

Even while they were designing the Seattle light rail system, they were still destroying the last of the existing rail corridors so they could not be used for light rail (the rail line that ran parallel to I405, the perfect place for commuter light rail).

The kindest thing one could say about this is it's incomprehensible.