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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, laying enormous amounts of wide, graded asphalt with proper drainage isn’t exactly cheap either.

I wasn't sure. Intuitively rail would seem to be cheaper, it looks like it should be a lot easier to lay a rail line than build a road. But rail lines need a lot more fill or bridging over low areas since heavy freight trains cannot climb grades of more than a few percent. On the other hand, rail switches and diamonds have got to be way less expensive than highway interchanges.

But if it's a two-directional shared medium it might be more practical to use than a centrally controlled rail line.

sort of like a shared packet network compared to a centrally managed circuit switched network

IIUC - standard heavy rail lines are 3-4x more expensive to build than a lane of freeway.

I guess no one is building one lane freeways, but I was still surprised by how much more expensive rail is.

That makes it cheaper if you can use it: a railway track has 20 times the capacity of a freeway lane.

(This is just the result of a basic Google search. It also says maintenance costs are "much less" for the railway.)

There are probably economy-of-scale issue too (we build a lot more roads), and different expectations of road vs. rail safety (a rail accident with a few injuries has national media coverage for days, upgrades costing millions may be rolled out to prevent a repeat; every day several people die on roads, the infrastructure is rarely improved).

At least for passenger lines the single track of heavy rail has a >30x higher route capacity than a single freeway lane (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity). So a fair comparison would be a single line of heavy rail to a 30+ lane freeway (one direction), making the rail about 1/10th the cost.

Assuming you’re referencing the graphic on that page, note that it’s discussing throughput of road vs rail in the city. Freeway is a very different kettle of fish.

I wonder if hyperloop/boring thing won't motivate realistic underground narrow freight trains.

ps: obligatory history article https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/02/a-world-without.html

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