The cost for rail and roads is about the same. This is more expensive because it isn't on the ground. Building a road on a bridge is vastly more expensive.
Road transport might be cheaper at first, but ongoing construction and maintenance costs do add up in a hurry, and as traffic builds the amount of money that has to be spent scales up pretty quickly.
A lot of the savings roads enjoy versus things like rail is that maintenance is perpetually deferred. A private railway has to ensure the tracks are all maintained to a very high standard, to do anything else is to invite disaster, but a local municipality can let its roads go to hell without much in the way of consequences.
I studied civil engineering, with a focus on structural, but a heavy geotechnical element and some pavement design and rail desing.
Highways are cheaper and easier because they're usually less investment and planning at once. They have their own downsides, don't get me wrong, but no. Rail is long term, lots of property seizure, usually a single track across a vast distance, etc.
Rail makes sense for a lot of places, but for a country as large as America, it's hard to see the benefits as fast as highways and we need logistics to switch to electric quickly.
That said, to make highways more efficient more places should take a page off of the 407 in Ontario, Canada. The fluctuating pricing keeps the roads in high usage most of the time and it stops tragedy of the commons issues with sinks (the cities that highways dump their vehicles to) and keeps highway economic pricing honest against things like rail and sea.
Not really. Rail is paved to high standards, roads to the same standards are more expensive yet. If I were to replace my driveway with a rail I wouldn't use the same high standards that the main line gets and so my costs would be much less (of course since there is no rail down my little street that would be pointless). Mainline rail is expensive, but so is highway paving.
A four lane highway costs $12M/mile, plus about $1.5M to resurface every 8-10 years. Each overpass bridge costs $8-20M.
That doesn’t include condemnation, etc.
Rail should just be rolled into the normal interstate capital funds. Separate the “meta” infrastructure from the trains and stations and more will get done.
Trains are a tough business because it’s such an old business.
IIRC because more of the highway cost is subsidized by the taxpayer, not necessarily because the cost is actually lower...
In the US, especially outside of the northeast, most interstate highways are not tolled, so users of the road don't pay any more for its maintenance than non-users do. But someone is still paying for it. Taxpayers who don't use the roads are effectively subsidizing those who do.
By contrast, railways usually own their rails and are obliged to maintain them themselves, and thus have to fold those costs into the price.
Roads cost practically nothing compared to rail. We have two to three million miles of paved roads in this country, and we spend around $200 billion a year maintaining it and building more. People drive 3 trillion miles on highways alone, adding up to a per passenger mile subsidy of $0.01-0.02. Rail subsidies (for local transit) add up to $0.50 per passenger mile.
What I don't understand -- how is road cheaper? I don't get it -- in Austin TX they are spending years to add a single lane to one of the main highways, along with high walls of thick concrete on either side to help with noise in neighborhood, etc. For all the talk of railway's cost and requiring disrupting existing buildings, we have paved roads criss-crossing all of our residential and commercial districts already. It certainly feels like the same way the government is promoting cars, spread out cities, and suburbia, they could be promoting more densely populated, rail-backed cities.
Cost can be very misleading, since most of the cost of big projects like these tends to be land acquisition.
For example, roads are on average much cheaper than rail lines per lane mile of construction, but lots of roads get built in rural or depopulated areas where land is cheaper, whereas rail tends to be built in denser corridors.
You can’t just look at the income from fare and use that to justify the construction cost. The train may have brought development and investment into the area that wouldn’t have happened otherwise earning tax for the government in other ways. Highways/interstates in the US would have been an infinite percentage of loss with your original assumption since they don’t produce anything directly.
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