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A comment on Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021). Parent comment

Re:Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic i... by cycomanic on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @11:52PM (#32407671)
Freight is far easier to transport using rail. However, the massive subsidies that road freight receives over other means of transport (i.e. the use of the road infrastructure basically for free, as they don't pay for maintance according to the damage they cause) makes rail financially unattractive in many cases.
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Re:Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic i... by rtpg on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @03:23AM (#32408740)
I don't get where "easier to transport via rail" comes from. The instant you have a post office, you do want some sort of roads, and the number of rails and switching you would need to get to even some of the distribution centers spread across various supermarkets is a big ask!

That doesn't mean every single last meter needs to happen via truck (lots of deliveries in urban areas can happen via foot or scooter) but ... at one point you need to get the 200 cartons of milk to the supermarket.

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Re:Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic i... by throwaway894345 on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @08:23AM (#32410730)
No one is saying “replace roads with rails”, they’re saying ship more things by rail up to the last mile (e.g., trucks take goods from rail depot to local markets). Today, much freight is shipped on highways.
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