2 ms·

IIUC - standard heavy rail lines are 3-4x more expensive to build than a lane of freeway. I guess no one is building one lane freeways, but I was still surpris

• Symbiote 5y ago
  That makes it cheaper if you can use it: a railway track has 20 times the capacity of a freeway lane. (This is just the result of a basic Google search. It also says maintenance costs are "much less" for the railway.) There are probably economy-of-scale issue too (we build a lot more roads), and different expectations of road vs. rail safety (a rail accident with a few injuries has national media coverage for days, upgrades costing millions may be rolled out to prevent a repeat; every day several people die on roads, the infrastructure is rarely improved).
• ben-schaaf 5y ago
  At least for passenger lines the single track of heavy rail has a >30x higher route capacity than a single freeway lane (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity). So a fair comparison would be a single line of heavy rail to a 30+ lane freeway (one direction), making the rail about 1/10th the cost.
  • davidbanham 5y ago
    Assuming you’re referencing the graphic on that page, note that it’s discussing throughput of road vs rail in the city. Freeway is a very different kettle of fish.