The reason for the interstate trucks is the taxation system that punishes railroads for owning their right-of-way. The trucks cause by far the most damage to the highways, but taxpayers subsidize that with the gas tax. Trucks also do not pay property tax on the highways.

Long haul freight should be done by loading the semi's trailer onto a flat car, and picking it up near the destination.

Another myopic government decision is to try to replace the diesel trucks with electric ones, you know, for the environment. Far better for the environment would be to do away with long haul trucking and use freight trains instead, which are far more efficient. Trains also do not spread tire and brake dust all over the place, either.

Trucks pay much higher tolls. Tolls are based on axles and weight.

But not nearly higher enough. Driving on roads damages them in proportion to the fourth power of per-axle weight, which is about 17,000lbs for a fully loaded semi and 2,000lbs for a car. To put that in perspective, if the toll for the car were $0.25, it'd have to be over $1,300 for the truck for it to be fair in that sense.

It will just raise shipping costs and therefore raise the cost of goods. By charging trucks more it creates a regressive tax effectively. By subsidizing them this is a way we utilize socialism to ensure lower wage people have access.

That's why move the freight by rail.

They move a bunch of freight by rail, nobody wants to pay someone a bunch of money to drive it when they can just throw it on a train.

And trains are relatively time inefficient so people in Maine couldn’t have their fresh Californian strawberries a couple days after they are plucked out of the field.

Maybe people don’t deserve to have fresh produce but that’s another discussion altogether.

Did you know that one of the very first uses of the first transcontinental railroad was shipping fresh California produce back east? And this was a century and a half ago.

They still do…depends on the shelf life of whatever they’re shipping.

They used ice in the old days. Strawberries will last up to 6 days if you refrigerate them coming home from the store, I don't know how long that is since they were picked.

A lot of fresh produce comes in by jet.

It’s quite common for me to show up at a shipper in the morning and whatever I’m picking up is still in the field. I’ve even had stuff loaded straight into the trailer out of the field a few times.

Uh, who doesn't deserve to have fresh produce??

Well the tax increase on trucks can be accompanied by some other tax decrease that mostly affects poorer people, such as a sales tax decrease or an income tax rate decrease in the lowest bracket.

The USA has possibly the best freight rail system in the world and it’s used extensively. Trucks pay a ton of tolls, licenses, and fuel tax.

The interstates are a constant stream of freight trucks. Trucks cause 4x the pollution of trains. Trucks spew tire and brake dust all over the countryside. Most of the maintenance on highways are the result of trucks, and this is paid for by taxpayers.

Trucks are what get goods to their destination. Rail can only get you so close.

Right. For a 3,000 mile journey, 2,998 of those miles can be by rail with the trailer set on a flatcar. The mile in and the last mile the trailer is picked off the flatbed and hooked up to the semi.

In what sense does the US have the best freight rail system in the world? Not trying to be antagonistic, here---just want to know why you think this.

Regarding your other comment ("trucks get the goods where they have to go"): in other countries, such as Switzerland, many buildings (think an Ikea store) are required to be reachable by rail, in which case regional trains can deliver goods to a hub, and then local trains can take goods from the hub to the store. No need for trucks in this case.

The absolute amount of freight moved by rail in the US is insane. But the US is also roughly the size of Europe and is shaped so there are many population centers far from the ocean.

If you remove bulk freight it’s quite a bit of a difference but still massive.

Much of European freight goes by boat and truck without much train.

I don't see how that relates to the US freight system being the best.

Can the efficiency of trains and trucks be quantified? It might make your argument stronger

"On average, rail is four times more fuel efficient than trucks, and emit 75% fewer GHG emissions. This fuel-efficiency can also help to reduce transportation costs significantly, while giving the business a promotional platform for sustainability initiatives."

   --- google "efficiency of trains vs trucks

> Trucks also do not pay property tax on the highways.

Why would they pay property tax on a highway they don’t own?

What they do pay is a per mile tax that is collected at the pump and divided up to the states through IFTA. Every single mile a truck travels is taxed by some state even if it’s just using it for personal use like shopping at Walmart.

Taxation of electric trucks is something that hasn’t been resolved quite yet.

Yes, they do pay a use tax. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the tax is far too low to account for the damage caused by the weight of the truck.

People make the assumption that the roads aren’t designed with truck travel in mind methinks.

The other option, making trucks pay their “fair share”, would just get passed along to consumers as higher prices and nothing would change. Like when fuel prices go up, truck drivers don’t eat those costs but they get a higher fuel surcharge which just gets accounted for when they’re pricing the goods on the grocery store shelves.

I also don’t think you fully understand how massively huge the transportation system is in the US. Assuming they could switch over to trains and assuming you live in the Bay Area they’d just have the trains deliver to Tracy or Stockton (where all the big warehouses currently are) and still have trucks deliver to the store down the street. Same amount of trucks you currently see with the only difference being the long haul truckers now doing local work.

Keeping with the Bay Area example, the last three times I delivered there two loads were going overseas out of Oakland and the third was a super small warehouse in San Leandro which didn’t even have a dock and I had to back a half mile down this tiny street — twice because there wasn’t anywhere to turn around and I was originally facing the wrong direction. I deliver to California all the time and all the warehouses are outside of the big cities. Well, except in LA but they’re just generally wrong about most things.

> People make the assumption that the roads aren’t designed with truck travel in mind methinks.

Fatigue damage is the biggest problem. A heavy truck pushes down on the asphalt/concrete, flexing it. Eventually, it cracks and crumbles away. As mentioned elsewhere, fatigue damage goes up as the 4th power of the load.

Railroad tracks are made of steel, and steel flexes nicely without crumbling away. If you stand next to the tracks, you can feel the earth go down as the wheels pass. Steel rails with the load spread out with ties are an effective solution.

The main issue, I think, is the entire economy would have to be changed on a massive, global scale.

I had this job 20 ago delivering for one of the major grocery chains. Southern Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona were all covered out of a single warehouse in Phoenix. That place is a shitshow and that’s with them having a couple hundred docks to unload trucks, lucky to get out of there in seven hours. If they were unloading train cars I couldn’t even imagine how bad it would be. Or the local drivers wasting a whole shift after getting a container out of the train yard.

Unloading trains is actually very efficient. If you have a train yard with many trains lined up next to each other and with box cars aligned, you can easily carry goods from train to train, through the box cars. This is far more space efficient than the huge parking lot which is needed to accommodate the wide turns that trucks have to make in order back up to a delivery zone.

I also don't see why it would be necessary to revamp the global economy to start using trains more.

It isn't necessary to revamp the entire economy. Things can be done one line at a time. All that's necessary is realigning cost and tax incentives so the costs reflect the actual cost (including externalities like pollution) rather than the grossly distorted subsidy system we currently have. The rest will take care of itself.

I love the hyperbole in this comment! :D

Allow me to single out the metric pound, which is defined as precisely a billionth of the weight the local road surface can withstand. Noteworthy for being one of the few units that work for both mass and weight because the local gravity is conveniently factored in.

You might be surprised to know that we have trucks in the UK, too.

That road is nose-to-tail 40-tonne trucks every night, because everything that goes to the north of Scotland from anywhere else in the UK goes up it.

To give you an idea of scale, Scotland has an area about the same as Alabama, but in terms of getting around you'd have to think along the lines of several times bigger than Texas.

> huge ass-trucks

https://xkcd.com/37/