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.
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.
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.