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Comment by goblinux | Hacker News Reader

What about trucking and shipping? The US - where this study took place- is huge, and most of it is very far from ports. 18 wheelers/semis are the biggest users of the American highway system and are necessary to get goods to/from production and consumption sites

These trucks also contribute to the rise in vehicle size. I did not like driving when I was in a sedan sized car sharing the high speed highways hours from cities on those highways

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Well put the trucks moving stuff in places where the people koving themselves aren't.

If they're going extremely long distances you could even have some kind of dedicated hard wearing road surface. And if lots of them are going to the same place you could get them to move in a convoy. And once they're in a convoy you could hook them together...

So build an entire second interstate system? That’s not really realistic, which tends to be the problem with most ideas to move away from cars.

They're alluding to trains.

What about the last mile issue? Like getting products to grocery stores and outlets?

Last mile distribution does not require extremely large trucks to be feasible.

I'd think that that depends on the density of the rail network and sparsity of the destinations.

That’s extremely realistic. The Netherlands has a separate system for bikes. The truck system would just be what the motorized traffic system is now, be it a bit scaled down.

Even in the Netherlands cars are not dead. A few years back (pre pandemic, maybe wfh will last, maybe it won't), I was staying with a friend. They all had cars, but one had just sold their car and committed to public transportation and bicycle. Even there he was really regretting his choice. In the US it isn't even a question. The vast majority of people need a car. We can make a goal of changing that, but it will be a while. So for now, what is the least bad car?

I think you and I have different concepts of realistic, ha. How do you propose people travel from rural place A to rural place B? Public transportation? That would be extremely expensive to implement, and would operate at a massive loss to service the entire US.

The interstate system and truck delivery seems to be pretty fantastic at servicing the continental US when paired with freight trains, cargo planes, etc. And it is similarly effective for delivery of all other kinds of things including people.

These systems would be good to implement in many cities, but interstate shipping and travel is another thing altogether.

Come on. The USA has one of the best freight railroad systems in the world. A large percentage of our cargo moves on rails. But rails can't extend everywhere, and it will seldom be practical to carry perishable, time-sensitive cargo in trains. That stuff pretty much has to go by truck.

Trains can be far faster than trucks. There are various serious deficiencies in the US train system that mean that transit speeds are far, far lower than they could be. There is no real technical reason why trains can't be faster than trucks with a similar marginal cost as to today. The infrastructure and systems are simply deficient.

Unfortunately not all goods are going to the same places. Nor are all goods moving at the same pace. Freight trains are a great piece of logistics infrastructure, but they can't just be US logistics infrastructure.

The US rail system is very well established and has been well built out since before the rise of the automobile. But goods need to get from the rail depot to the end destination and right now the best we have is enormous 18-wheelers and as long as those are on the road, it's too dangerous for me to want to take a smaller car

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