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> The US overuses highways for long haul trucking because trucks pay a lower percentage of infrastructure and externalities costs than trains do. Source? The U

> The US overuses highways for long haul trucking because trucks pay a lower percentage of infrastructure and externalities costs than trains do. Source? The US has a massive freight train industry. We have more railroad than any other country - and almost double second place (China). I guess "overuses" is subjective, but we use commercial freight way more than anyone else. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...

Retric 4y ago
Depending on metrics, Canada, China, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland and or Russia all make better use of rail than the US which makes the total number of rail lines actually look worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag... We don’t rank #1 by total freight, total fright miles, either of those per citizen, or percentage of fright carried by rail. We rank much worse in terms of passenger rail, or electrified rail. Number of rail miles only really shows the size of the US not the utility of it’s rail network as we also have the largest road network. The relative lack of electrified rail demonstrates the issue, the US network is mostly single tracked which causes a lot of problems even with the total number of miles the utility of any given mile of track tends to be low.