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Agreed, my point on dirt roads doesn't make much sense. But point still stands, if state govt's struggle to repave arterial roads every few years to the standa

Agreed, my point on dirt roads doesn't make much sense. But point still stands, if state govt's struggle to repave arterial roads every few years to the standards of our taxes, do we think any national gov't would shoulder paying 10,0000 times that cost yearly to maintain bleeding edge technology across 100k highway miles? In the 19th-20th century rail/trolley was used in the same way municipal buses are now. Great for absolutely defined schedules across short distances for local residents. Do you see that scaling up to highways though? Even if we used old school powered rail and cable technology to charge up highways for big rigs only, that would be such an unfathomable, enormous cost to implement and maintain. We can't maintain the rail network in this country, which is dwarfed in size by highways.

Retric 4y ago
You seem to think this is expensive, but these systems are cheap enough to save money when used infrequently by electric trains. Highways see a lot more truck traffic. At scale this isn’t the kind of thing state or federal government needs to pay for out of pocket, it’s a revenue generating opportunity like total roads and can be financed as such. It’s a classic chicken and egg problem where you need enough miles of electrified highways to convince people to buy new or modify old trucks. Realistically if hot swapping batteries or hydrogen was the cheaper alternative that’s the correct infrastructure to build. Passenger rail largely failed because of the last mile problem, but here batteries solves the issue. A mile of electric highway can easily let you drive several miles of non electric roads.