This is a plausible hypothesis, but the thing that's missing is how many times can rail be traversed before being unusable and how many times can a road be trav

This is a plausible hypothesis, but the thing that's missing is how many times can rail be traversed before being unusable and how many times can a road be traversed by the same measure. Intuitively, I would imagine the net tonnage passed before wearing out asphalt is far lower than it is for a chunk of steel welded to the ground. Maybe the cost of maintaining rail feels worse / is a harder political sell because the full price is acutely concentrated in time, whereas each individual pothole is a mere budgetary papercut?