Platooning really needs to to be taken one step further to convince: not just dedicated lanes, but dedicated right of ways with optional use of tramway-style in

Platooning really needs to to be taken one step further to convince: not just dedicated lanes, but dedicated right of ways with optional use of tramway-style integrated rails and electrification. If robotic driving is solvable, then a robotic, on-the-fly mode switch between road and rail wheelsets should be easy in comparison. The vehicles traveling hybrid routes like that would probably be seen as (much) better railcars () rather than as slightly better trucks/buses. Your point that those won't directly reduce congestion on urban road networks is certainly valid, but i am convinced that the increase of long distance passenger service quality (many single-car direct connections instead of switching between few long trains) would have a network effect spillover influencing the modal split in favor of public transportation also on the urban level. So indirectly urban congestion might still drop. () benefits of the "better railcar": frequent, nonstop hub to hub connections for passengers, door to door transport for freight, easy fallback to regular roads for maintenance or incompleteness of the hybrid network, fallback to the road wheelset for emergency braking power, for switching tracks and to climb gradients much too steep for rail traction. Because of the much more relaxed gradients, a hybrid network might even be cheaper to build than a pure rail network when the terrain is not perfectly flat. Of course "hybrid" would only mean optional rail use for increased efficiency with heavy loads, not mixed use including rail-only vehicles.