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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

And the advantages are being enjoyed by all of us, at least in the US.

If you’re the kind of person who eats food, uses toilet paper and paper towels, and lives inside a building made of lumber, insulation, HVAC, pipes, and electrical components, those all got to your point of use on a truck.

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The US has a really good freight train network. Yet there's a good chance the products you discussed didn't use the much more efficient train for the long distance portion of their transit.

If it's more efficient, is that not an arbitrage opportunity?

- it's less convenient. If the cost difference is small because trucking is cheap people will pay more for convenience.

- the cost difference is smaller than it should be. Trucking is highly subsidized, since diesel taxes don't come anywhere close to paying for the roads. OTOH railroads have to maintain their own infrastructure.

... Usually on the best land they were gifted for building the railway line on the first place, so heavily subsidized as well

They were gifted the land when the land was close to worthless because the transport costs for western products were higher than their value. The train is what made western land valuable. That land had value before the train came through was almost pure speculation -- people bought and settled land assuming that it would have value once a train arrived.

It was a real subsidy, but it was small and it was > 100 years ago.

OTOH, the land the freeways and roads were built on already had significant value before it was expropriated for road construction and wasn't paid for with diesel tax revenue, so it's yet another subsidy for truck traffic.

It's efficient in terms of energy, but slow after decades of neglect. People pay for fast.

Ah yes, the "free market" fallacy.

Watch this:

- My trucks require roads and do more damage to roads than trains do to rail tracks? No problem, roads are paid for by the taxpayer, while the rail companies have to pay to build and maintain their tracks.

- My trucks produce harmful emissions and particulates that trains don't? No problem, I don't pay for any of that.

- My trucks kill people in accidents? Again, no problem, not paying for any of that.

Yay, we've successfully optimized out any inefficiencies of trucks by externalizing literally all that's possible to externalize. Isn't the free market great?

It has a good rail freight system but it’s running at capacity. Trucks are still needed for connections.

This is where the road subsidy becomes much more apparent. We use appropriation and tax dollars to expand the road network, but the railroads generally don't have access to either. So they're not expanding other than by running longer and longer trains.

As for connections, electric trucks would work great for that.

> We use appropriation and tax dollars to expand the road network, but the railroads generally don't have access to either.

The federal government leases tracks using Amtrack money (among other public agencies). They get low interest rate loans as well. Definitely nothing near Chinese level of subsidies.

Why does that matter? If you consume more toilet paper and paper towels and lumber, insulation, HVAC, pipes, and electrical components, then you would end up paying proportionally more.

Businesses will have an incentive to transport goods efficiently, if the costs are not subsidized by consumers.

Just because everyone benefits from it doesn’t mean it’s good to subsidize it.

This is basically the definition of something that should be subsidized. Same story for public education, health care, clean drinking water, etc

Those others have far fewer externalities than burning diesel to move heavy trucks.

Different kind of "everyone benefits from it." There's "individual people benefit when they pay for themselves and everyone does this" and then there's "everyone benefits from each individual receiving it." Public education etc. is the second one: we all as a society benefit when little Timmy gets educated, so we subsidize it in order to maximize that benefit. Transportation of goods is the first kind. I and all of my neighbors benefit from it, but we each benefit individually. When Bob down the street indirectly pays a few dollars to have some item transported to a store by truck, that doesn't benefit me at all. Likewise Bob doesn't benefit from my usage. "Everyone benefits" just because it's ubiquitous.

In economics terms, you want to subsidize things with positive externalities, because they'd otherwise be used less than the most efficient amount. I don't think trucking has positive externalities. It definitely has negative externalities, which would be an argument for taxing it (which of course we already do in various ways) rather than subsidizing it.

Not when subsidizing it prevents us addressing the bigger problem. Subsidize electric trucks, subsidize using cargo trains for 99% of the transportation of goods instead.

We need energy, therefore we should subsidize coal plants.

Diesel, or rather energy, is also a way bigger part of every single aspect of our modern world. Let's take drinking a can of coke as an example:

First degree: It came into your home from the factory through the shop. 80% product + 20% diesel.

Second degree: Product is aluminum can + water + ingredients. Aluminium came to be a can through 70% refined aluminum + 15% diesel (transport) + 15% electrical energy (pressing the can). Water was pumped locally: free from the ground + 100% electrical energy. Ingredients came from a farm: 80% local product + 20% diesel.

Third degree: Electrical energy came from 40% gas turbines, 30% hydro, 30% wind farm. Ingredients from farms came from soil 40%, 35% nitrogen fertilizer (== gas), 25% diesel (machines)

... and so on

If you decompose everything all the way, the global tally is either matter, which is given to us by nature for free. Or energy; The sources of which being vastly composed of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel prices affect everything.

These fossil resources being finite we can also conclude we're experiencing a centuries-long hay-fire. But hey, we're merely plateauing right now; and most of us won't be here for the harder part of the crash.

And I didn't even mention climate change.

> Or energy; The sources of which being vastly composed of fossil fuels.

But we can choose to change this. This is too often presented as though it's inevitable but it isn't, we went from "This can't work in theory" to "OK it works in theory but can't work in practice" to now "OK it works in practice but it's too expensive".

Fossil fuels aren't magic, if we actually wanted Crude Oil we could make it, we don't, but the "Without fossil fuels there is no plastic / fertilizer / etc. is fear mungering, we can just make these things. As you explained the matter is right here already, we're standing on damp rock, which if you wanted uh, water or rock means you couldn't come to a better place. If you need Helium, yeah, that's not great, making Helium from scratch is relatively difficult, but the vast majority of things we need but are today made from fossil fuels, including jet fuel, fertilizer, plastics we could make with things we didn't dig out of the deep Earth if we use energy to make them. It's not impossible it's just expensive, and last I checked Mother Nature didn't invent money, that's our fault - so expensive isn't even a real problem, we made it up.

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