Yep.

I don't really see the point in anything long range for autonomous vehicles in the near-term. We should optimize the use-case of them driving people and goods to and from train stations. For this use-case it should be entirely fine if the max speed they can achieve is 20mph. The stopping times and force that can be achieved at those speeds should bring down the danger by quite a bit.

you mean like a .. train

No. Trains are great for what they do, but roads go more places.

Do roads have to go more places? Are they dramatically cheaper and easier to make and cheaper to maintain than train tracks? Or do we just already have a bunch of them?

Mind you I'm not taking about last-mile dirt road up a mountain to one family, but the massive arteries with enormous throughput that constitute the vast majority of lbs/mile of shipping.

Railroads have much much stricter requirements with respect to maximum allowed curvature and slope. So yes roads can go far more places than rails can.

Duly noted

or like a … road train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train

Yeah that would be ideal. Sadly a lot of stuff goes wrong in building rail because governments have to do it and clearly suck at it, and if it weren't so, there wouldn't be nearly as many trucks on the road.

Unlike building rail, the concept I outlined would be feasible to do for a private corporation though, even a startup. The delta in necessary resources between the two is huge.

I'm also not quite convinced that you can pack nearly as much cargo on a rail at the same time (with different destinations) as on the road, but the reason for that believe might be the fact that I'm not a rail expert.

Fortunately not all governments are terrible at rail infra planning/upkeep. Perhaps autonomous trucks as you outline could do the last X miles from the point the train offloads.

The US is number 3 in the world in both total tonne-kilometers and tonne-kilometers per capita shipped by rail, and it’s in the top 10 in percentage of freight moved by rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

I could been specific - I mean passenger rail.

You’re replying to a comment about freight rail, in a thread about freight rail, and you mentioned autonomous trucking. I’m thoroughly confused how you could possibly have been talking about passenger rail.