Not necessarily. A 40 tonne lorry damages the motorway as much as 1000 160’000 passenger cars. It will lead to the state having to renew the road surfaces every few years. Rails don’t have that problem, they’ll happily take 100 tonnes for decades.
A 40 tonne lorry damages the motorway as much as 1000 passenger cars.
According to an old and well-attested empirical formula, road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. So if we make the pessimistic assumption that those passenger cars weigh 2 tons (pretend they’re all SUV-sized EVs), then the damage ratio is on the order of (40^4) / (2^4), which means your 40-ton lorry does as much damage as 160,000 cars.
The point I’m making is that the government has already decided to maintain the highways, so continuing on is the status quo. If they wanted to make new railroads they’d have to expend political capital to get anything new funded.
Not necessarily. A 40 tonne lorry damages the motorway as much as
1000160’000 passenger cars. It will lead to the state having to renew the road surfaces every few years. Rails don’t have that problem, they’ll happily take 100 tonnes for decades.According to an old and well-attested empirical formula, road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. So if we make the pessimistic assumption that those passenger cars weigh 2 tons (pretend they’re all SUV-sized EVs), then the damage ratio is on the order of (40^4) / (2^4), which means your 40-ton lorry does as much damage as 160,000 cars.
Thank you for the correction! I remembered incorrectly.
The point I’m making is that the government has already decided to maintain the highways, so continuing on is the status quo. If they wanted to make new railroads they’d have to expend political capital to get anything new funded.