But if we were really serious about the driver shortage and freight bottleneck issues, we would simply build more rail. We've had (basically) driverless trucks before the driverful kind!
The fact that investors flock to AI hail maries and not tried-and-proven infrastructure demonstrates the limitation of the demand on one hand, and asset bubble in tech on the other.
Elsewhere the US continues build tons and tons of roads. According to the Bureau of Transport Statistics the US highway system went from 4,050,717 miles in 2009 to 4,171,125 miles in 2019. This is a delta 120,408 miles, or an increase of 2.9%.
The 710 might be an interesting example, but it's not exactly indicative of a trend.
Actually correlating this down to individual routes in an exhausting endeavor, given all the places these could be recorded. But I found that we did designate 7 new highways in the past 10 years, including I-14, I-11, I-87, I-41, I-42, I-2, and I-22.
But ultimately the expansion of the highways has downstream effects - state will buy new land, build new roads, etc. as density flows out. If you have a two lane highway going into a city and it's congested, and then you expand it, more people move out of the city or more further away - obviously someone is building new roads or expanding existing ones as that occurs.
Simply put, railways are much more efficient between two fixed points than roads. They require much less fuel per ton, and they require much less labor, land, and capital equipment per person mile or ton mile. If the costs were properly priced in, consumers of various different types would strongly prefer rail for transit between fixed points (e.g. city to city). But currently the inefficiency of road usage is paid for by the federal government.
The density argument is massively overstated. Ohio has roughly the same density as France 282/mi^2 vs. 269/mi^2, and it's not even our most dense state. The fact that states like Ohio don't have anywhere close to the rail network that France has is a consequence of political decisions, not economics or the built environment.
Don’t project differences between passenger rail systems to freight rail. It is by all means clear that US has the best freight rail system in the world.
I concede that the rail system in Ohio suffers from a lack of funding that the road system enjoys. I blame the politicians.
I first learned about the Jones act while reading about cruise ship port destinations (since most cruise ships have flags of convenience, a notable exception being the cruise ship based out of Hawaii for Hawaiian ports).
Its a relentlessly efficient industry and I don't think a lot of Westerners are willing to spend an entire year on a cargo ship. The Jones act is actually an admission that the US cannot compete.
This doesn't stop nearly as many people/companies as much as I wish it would.
This prevents someone from say dropping off all their goods in Miami, then letting a British liner pick them up later and drop half off in NYC, and the other half in London.
Instead you have to either ship it yourself to NYC and Miami, or you have to send it by train to NYC from Miami.
If automated trucks result in a lower capital and operational cost on behalf of the business, even with an ample supply of qualified truckers, why wouldn't that necessitate investment in that space?
Keeping in mind the relationship between liquidity and risk, this shows they don't need new capacity too soon/desperately.
Also keep in mind things like making delivery cheaper in city than suburbans. There's lots of small cheap (in terms of investment, if not revenue hit) ways to make things more efficient. In that case, the fact that they rather make shipping rates artificially flat for appearance's sake says something about the long-term large-scale laxity of the economy, these recent specific bottlenecks not withstanding.
No. The premium on known legal liability and working tech would outweigh a certain amount of opex (and capex can just be amortized into opex). And the research would need to pay itself off at several multiples. If the truckers were making minimum wage, it's unlikely that the amount you could charge would justify the investment ever. If they were all making $500/hr it would justify a huge research project.
That said, the benefits also assume that for some reason the only time the goods are idle is on a truck, which makes no sense in many cases.
Plus many of them are self-employed and pay very little to no tax
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.993451,-83.7608816,484m/data...
Pan west along the rail.
A big rail company has a whole depot(?) by the airport.
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9760042,-83.6717785,484m/dat...
Overall rail is generally going to be much, much more land efficient than roads. Yes, rail has a limited turning radius that must be accounted for[0], but rail can also deliver a lot more cargo than a road can for less maintenance. The Union Pacific indicates that the maximum weight for a shipment is 268,000 lbs per car. Meanwhile a semi-truck cannot exceed 80,000 lbs pretty much anywhere. A single freight train can pretty easily deliver a couple thousand tons of cargo, something that would take a hundred semi-trucks to deliver. This will almost certainly result in extra lanes and parking facilities for semi-trucks, increasing land use.
And then there's the fact that semi-trucks are really, really hard on roads. They do the overwhelming majority of the damage to them, due to their weight. From an infrastructure cost perspective, the best thing you could do is try and shift as much industrial shipments off of roads and onto railways. Obviously last mile will always be an issue, chances are your local target will be stocked via truck, but we could at least connect factories and ports via rail.
0 - Then again, so do highways.
Not at all.
VC investors flock to Hail Marys because industry disruption makes outsized returns (which is their investment thesis).
Investors who want stable, predictable, long term returns (eg retirement funds) love infrastructure projects.
Nobody is doing infra at scale in the private sector. Part of the reason I is lied -- it is risky not because it won't work, but simply because of the shear amount of upfront cost and duration of construction up front.
Of course, safe investor flocking to indexes of existing things does not missing big infra investment make.