The railroad can’t have individual cars break off from the line to go to arbitrary warehouses, stores, and residences.

The railroad is an amazingly low cost way to move tonnage, if you’re going from a place where the railroad stops to another place where the railroad stops. There aren’t really companies that _could_ be using rail and aren’t.

But it just isn’t cost effective in many cases once you add in last-mile costs. If we built more rail (politically infeasible), you might see more usage but ultimately you still suffer from needing at least one locomotive per train.

I'm assuming this is a north america centric viewpoint - there are plenty of places in europe and asia where rail is far more common and has societal/political favor.

Solving the last mile by having stores that get shipments near a local train station that serves both cargo and passenger needs, and using kei trucks for small local deliveries is definitely a different set of tradeoffs.

Huh? The US has the highest train cargo traffic in the world, followed by China and Russia [0]. Passenger train network is what is lacking.

On the other hand, trucks are very popular in Europe and Asia. 75% of land freight in Europe are by truck [1]

[0]-https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/highest-railway-cargo-tr...

[1] - https://www.acea.auto/fact/fact-sheet-trucks/

> The railroad can’t have individual cars break off from the line to go to arbitrary warehouses, stores, and residences

So the hypothetical trucks can't handle freeways but can self-drive on much more complex urban and suburban roads?

I can tell from your tone that you're looking for an argument, but I don't think either of us know what you want to argue about.

It's a rhetorical question highlighting the contradiction of expecting unsophisticated systems that resort to follow-the-human tactics to be capable of self-driving inder more complex conditions in the last mile.

I have zero interest in debating the difficulty of freeway driving vs the last mile involves unmotorized participants and significantly more traffic control- that is settled in my mind.

Hah. Sort of. But the big difference is the railroad doesn't let anyone else use it. A regular road can support cars, trucks, truck convoys and maybe even bikes or pedestrians. A railroad can support trains.

Do they, pragmatically speaking? High-volume cargo traffic quickly wears down the asphalt and causes regular jams, a bike lane unseparated from cars is a safety hazard enough large enough to push many potential riders off the road, and most morning commutes would be better served by well-developed public transit.

One EMD SD70ACe locomotive moves over 10,000 tonnes of cargo using 1,300 L of diesel per 1,000 km. The equivalent 286 trucks would consume 107,250 L, while needing 55.8 km of a single-lane highway, compared to the 2.16 km freight train.

Similarly, the average US car has 1.5 passengers per ~30 m² of space, so 20 m² per person. An average bike is about 2 m² per person. A typical trolley car holds ~160 passengers per 200 square meters, so 1.25 m² per person. A tram reliably moves at 60–80 km/h on interurban routers, or 30 km/h in urban centers with frequent stops, a considerable improvement over San Francisco's 16 km/h by car for last mile.

the problem with rail is that it's hard to scale up (and down)

getting new tracks built takes waaay too long (because of NIMBY and simply because the road is usually already there)

there's no long-term thinking from politics, and no market forces converging to somehow over the years lead to some compounding (so the inefficiencies don't really translate to some big problem -- well, climate change and slower GDP growth)