Yeah but it’d be fucking insane to build a state highway to each and every destination in every hamlet, just like it would be for rail.
And it’s not just cost of initial construction, it’s also cost of maintenance. If the ground shifts slightly under the road, it’s a bump. If it shifts under a railway, it’s a derailment for the first train that finds it and a couple million dollars in recovery and repair, plus the downtime while that section is out of service. And that doesn’t even start to account for overhead like signal operation, whereas on a road you just use a stop sign.
I like trains more than the next guy, but you absolutely cannot just replace every road with a railway.
A road built and maintained by taxpayers is much cheaper (to a shipping company) than building, maintaining, and operating a railway. Making taxpayers responsible for the infrastructure you use is one way to make your business much more profitable.
Compared to building and maintaining a railway, yes, by orders of magnitude.
Citation needed
A cursory search shows rail in rural areas is $2 million per mile and a highway is $4-10 million per mile.
Yeah but it’d be fucking insane to build a state highway to each and every destination in every hamlet, just like it would be for rail.
And it’s not just cost of initial construction, it’s also cost of maintenance. If the ground shifts slightly under the road, it’s a bump. If it shifts under a railway, it’s a derailment for the first train that finds it and a couple million dollars in recovery and repair, plus the downtime while that section is out of service. And that doesn’t even start to account for overhead like signal operation, whereas on a road you just use a stop sign.
I like trains more than the next guy, but you absolutely cannot just replace every road with a railway.
A road built and maintained by taxpayers is much cheaper (to a shipping company) than building, maintaining, and operating a railway. Making taxpayers responsible for the infrastructure you use is one way to make your business much more profitable.