5 ms·

next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. And then we could move them o

next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. And then we could move them off the highways and onto specialized "tracks" that guarantee they don't deviate from the planned routes. speculative, alien technology, admittedly, but some day our scientists will figure it out i bet!

ethbr1 1y ago
Hmm. That sounds like it might lead to a monopolization of these tracks, as networks consolidate, and then ultimately evolve into a stagnant industry more focused on cutting costs than innovating...
- recursivedoubts 1y ago
  dammit
- xracy 1y ago
  I suspect that's why a competent government might invest more in these tracks as they might contribute a lot to delivery infrastructure. Especially in a consumer-based economy where shipping goods is important.
  - krapp 1y ago
    Let me know where you can find a competent government not currently trying to burn down its own consumer-based economy with tariffs and xenophobia and which doesn't consider trains a communist plot. And whether they take American passports.
    - robocat 1y ago
      I'm not sure governments learn by seeing the mistakes of other governments. But consecutive New Zealand governments have made some big mistakes. Capitalist party sold the national rail to an Australian company because rail was inefficient and costing a ton. Privately run cut back staff significantly. A few years later the story was that that was failing privately run, so the socialist party bought it back at exhorbitant cost. Now current governmentis trying to sort out a massive budget blow-out to get "rail" ferries between North and South Islands working (roll-on roll-off). The private ferry (Bluebridge) is doing okay I think. I believe the lesson is that rail sucks here, economically speaking (whether privately run or publicly run). Unfortunately old voters love rail so the politicians pander to them.
      - tcmart14 1y ago
        Dumb American, so I could be totally off base. But New Zealand appears small enough on the map that just doing a shit ton of barges along defined coastal water routes makes a lot more sense than trains. In the US trains could be efficient, but we are also like 2,500 miles coast to coast.
        o11c 1y ago
        The problem with water travel in New Zealand is that weather often closes ports. But it is true that NZ lacks the scale that many existing rail systems rely on, and also lacks high-speed roads (a good rule of thumb for driving anywhere in NZ is: look at how many miles it is on the map, calculate how fast you could go that far in America, then double the time).
        khuey 1y ago
        New Zealand doesn't have inland waterways the way the US does so barges don't seem sufficient. They did actually get a fancy self-propelled barge for use transporting minerals on the West Coast of the South Island last year and it got pushed aground by a storm in its first couple weeks of service. It's been sitting in port in Nelson ever since being refloated. https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-to-innovate-new-zealand-coastal-shipping-grounds-in-storm https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-to-innovate-new...
      - cycomanic 1y ago
        The problem about New Zealand is that they hate investing in infrastructure and everyone loves the kiwi myth of the number 8 wire which means they just build provisional solution on top of provisional solution. The example of the ferries is a good one, the cost blow out was because they needed to build a new dock in Wellington. So instead of just living with the fact that yes building infrastructure as become expensive in a country which has seen a massive building boom (like many other places), the new Conservative government decides to cancel the ferry order without any alternative in place, and now the most important connection of the country is running on failing ferries which are more than 25 years old (there have been several incidents in the last couple of years where they were drifting powerless), and (especially considering the massive penalty for cancelling the contract) the new ferries will be just as expensive as the cancelled ones just being much smaller (the old contract was actually signed at quite advantageous economic times) and arriving much later. This is certainly not an example of rail not working. Trucks on the road are a massive disaster as well. Most roads are single lane, so it's not uncommon to be stuck behind trucks for long stretches, this is especially annoying considering that many roads are very windy and truck speed up when coming to passing lanes.
    - nicoburns 1y ago
      Trains are as popular as ever almost everywhere in Europe.
      - wahern 1y ago
        Rail freight's share of shipping has been on a steep decline for decades in Europe: > Freight rail’s modal share has been in decline across Europe, both in terms of market share and the profitability of major operators. In France for instance, modal share declined by 50 percent, from around 30 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent today. By contrast, road transport has been steadily increasing. In 1980, less than 50 percent of goods were transported by road. This rose to more than 75 percent by 2018. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/infrastructure/our-insights/bold-moves-to-boost-european-rail-freight https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/infrastructure/our-insig... By contrast, for most of that same period (1980-today) rail freight was growing its share in the US, though in the past decade or so growth has favored trucking.
      - nradov 1y ago
        Trains move as much freight as ever in the USA.
        gnatolf 1y ago
        Not to take away from that fact, but the share of train-moved freight (over time) is more interesting. It probably highlights the complications of scaling train networks easily.
    - aaomidi 1y ago
      Switzerland?
      - rjsw 1y ago
        Austria, France and Italy are currently copying Switzerland in building base tunnels [1] to mostly carry rail freight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel
  - adrr 1y ago
    US is already the largest shipper of freight by train in terms of shipped tonnage and also total tracks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni...
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      Not a very interesting data point since it doesn’t account for nation area, utilization, etc.
      - crote 1y ago
        Don't forget geography, and by extension type of freight. The United States doesn't have a lot of navigable waterways, and none go east-west. This means that any bulk goods you want to transport have to go via rail. There is no other option. As a result the railway network has been optimized to do bulk transport at the lowest price possible, even if it means sacrificing speed and quality. After all, coal doesn't care if it sits in a siding for several days. It's true that the US is shipping an awful lot of tonnes via rail, but this doesn't say anything about its ability to ship regular goods. Getting a single wagon from point to point in a timely manner is significantly more complicated than doing the same with an entire train.
      - adrr 1y ago
        https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freight_Shipping_in_the_United_States.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freight_Shipping_in_... Here’s tonnage miles by class. For comparison. There is only 20,000 miles of railway that Amtrak operates on. Thats a fraction of passenger railway compared to China and EU.
nadir_ishiguro 1y ago
Ah, you're thinking of the world famous Las Vegas Hyperloop!
msla 1y ago
Sounds like something that would require a lot of infrastructure that wouldn't make a lot of sense to build in the most rural areas of a country, unlike roads which can be quite cost-effective even without towns nearby.
usrusr 1y ago
Problem is those railroad cars usually don't share origin and destination. And spending a day or two on the switchyard for every couple of hours of actual travel isn't what customers want. The beaty of platooning is that trucks can join and leave while traveling at speed, all they need is a free lane on the side. And if you really want to tease out all the efficiencies of rail, without suffering the drawbacks, you make electrified lanes that also have embedded tracks (like those of a tramway, but designed for higher load) and make the trucks multimodals that can switch while moving. Actually just those trucks that would see an economic advantage, trucks designed for light, high volume loads would likely stick to road wheels only. A setup like this could actually be super economical compared to two because a rail network needs huge separation between trains because rails are terrible for braking fast. Multimodals on the other hand could be designed to be able to switch to their road wheels in an emergency. And a rail network needs an ungodly amount of nines in terms of reliability and rarity of maintenance, because there is no plan B network. Reliability nines are expensive. Multimodals on the other hand could easily be diverted to a dirt road for a bit when the main lanes are defective or going through maintenance. Where they would be running on the same batteries they carry anyways, for the last couple of miles on regular, non-electrified roads.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  switchyard Why not just use container cranes like docks? There's no reason they won't work inland.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    And indeed they exist every 200 miles or so.
  - usrusr 1y ago
    Would that be faster though? You still have to stop the entire train just to get one unit in or out. And if it's more units, chances are that parallelization hits a capacity bottleneck because of the inherent cost trade-off between having lots of cranes on standby vs just waiting a little longer in the rare moments of action. Are container cranes used for routing within a rail network at all? Might well be that they are only ever used for mode change at the edge, despite having been mature and available technology for decades.
floxy 1y ago
So why aren't trains automated yet? I mean, beside the inter-airport shuttles. Seems like a much more constrained set of parameters to deal with. I'd think this would be a good "first" project to tackle for an AV company, even if the economics of replacing locomotive drivers/engineers weren't super compelling. Is it an insurance thing? Because a train wreck could be much more disastrous and costly? Or is it a union thing? Others?
- tw04 1y ago
  > So why aren't trains automated yet? Why? The labor of a conductor is a fraction of the total cost to move the cargo, to the point it’s a rounding error.
  - aaomidi 1y ago
    And the job creates a sense of community too. At some point it’ll probably be automated, but yeah, what’s the point.
  - LorenPechtel 1y ago
    And it means someone on site to react sensibly when things go wrong. Think of the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilot said "This is the captain. Brace for impact." The flight attendants picked up on that and immediately began directing the passengers on what "brace for impact" means. Without that how many would have reacted properly (the info is on the safety card, but how many have read it well enough??), how many would be asking for information, how many would just generally be panicking?
    - toast0 1y ago
      If a freight train is unstaffed, who would brace for impact? Anyway, labor costs to have a couple engineers aboard is much less than if the load was travelling by truck, even if the trucks have no driver in them, they're likely supervised at a ratio with more humans than it takes to operate a long freight train.
      - 1y ago
hermitShell 1y ago
Wouldn’t it be great to enable electric cars to go long distances with platoons? Like a bus system for electric cars to go between cities and charge while you drive. The ‘bus’ is basically a big efficient generator that can charge up the cars behind it. A lot like mid flight refueling for fighter jets.
- voidspark 1y ago
  Generator powered by what? If its a diesel powered generator, that's even less efficient and more polluting than just using diesel trucks in the first place.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    Hydrogen
  - hermitShell 1y ago
    As I understand the benefits of electric cars themselves, the burning of hydrocarbons at scale is more efficient than piecemeal. So if the ‘bus’ contained a turbine, there would probably be net benefit. Or a nuclear bus! Plus, even if it’s equal to the present state of affairs, we need a practical road to electrification of transport. I’m sure there are many cheaper options, it’s just fun to think about the infrastructure options.
o11c 1y ago
The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. The existing rail system has at least the following constraints: * Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare. * Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point. * Poor cornering and elevation changing. * Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles) * Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule. * Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb". Which of these can reasonably be changed?
- sephamorr 1y ago
  My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.
  - TrainedMonkey 1y ago
    Always upvote electric trains!
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that. You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
And people could just vote for things to be better!
andrepd 1y ago
It's fascinating the frequency with which techbros invent "trains but worse".
bonoboTP 1y ago
Google Australian road trains.
cco 1y ago
Jokes aside, Germany trialed a hybrid catenary truck system which was really neat. Diesel to get you from the warehouse to the highway, extend your pantograph and boom, you're electric in the right lane (outside lane) all the way to your exit. Never looked into how it penciled out but I always thought that was a great idea. Seems like there is a path to add in driverless aspects to the system as well given you have contact with a wire the whole time.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  It penciled out by striking it through. Meaning they all have been built back, and aren't in operation anymore, with no further experiments planned. Also disinterest by truck manufacturers.
zer00eyz 1y ago
> next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. You don't need the tracks, and its called a 'road train' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train
IMTDb 1y ago
Yeah! Then those same engineers will notice how much single point of failure that model leads to, and how rigid that is. So they will be looking to leverage the existing much denser, much flexible, more connected and redundant network that exists alongside those rare tracks. It’s almost like this evolution did not happen before.
- randunel 1y ago
  Imagine having rails instead of roads, and roads instead of rails. The same argument would apply, only roads would lead to less efficiency overall.
Dildonics4All 1y ago
[dead]
rsanek 1y ago
turns out, the US has already done this at a scale larger than anyone else 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...
tim333 1y ago
Trains have been with us for over a century and aren't going to suddenly change on their own to solve all transport problems. Self driving tech may help make them work better by handling the station to end location bit cheaper or more efficiently than human workers.

ethbr1 1y ago

Hmm. That sounds like it might lead to a monopolization of these tracks, as networks consolidate, and then ultimately evolve into a stagnant industry more focused on cutting costs than innovating...

recursivedoubts 1y ago
dammit
xracy 1y ago
I suspect that's why a competent government might invest more in these tracks as they might contribute a lot to delivery infrastructure. Especially in a consumer-based economy where shipping goods is important.
- krapp 1y ago
  Let me know where you can find a competent government not currently trying to burn down its own consumer-based economy with tariffs and xenophobia and which doesn't consider trains a communist plot. And whether they take American passports.
  - robocat 1y ago
    I'm not sure governments learn by seeing the mistakes of other governments. But consecutive New Zealand governments have made some big mistakes. Capitalist party sold the national rail to an Australian company because rail was inefficient and costing a ton. Privately run cut back staff significantly. A few years later the story was that that was failing privately run, so the socialist party bought it back at exhorbitant cost. Now current governmentis trying to sort out a massive budget blow-out to get "rail" ferries between North and South Islands working (roll-on roll-off). The private ferry (Bluebridge) is doing okay I think. I believe the lesson is that rail sucks here, economically speaking (whether privately run or publicly run). Unfortunately old voters love rail so the politicians pander to them.
    - tcmart14 1y ago
      Dumb American, so I could be totally off base. But New Zealand appears small enough on the map that just doing a shit ton of barges along defined coastal water routes makes a lot more sense than trains. In the US trains could be efficient, but we are also like 2,500 miles coast to coast.
      - o11c 1y ago
        The problem with water travel in New Zealand is that weather often closes ports. But it is true that NZ lacks the scale that many existing rail systems rely on, and also lacks high-speed roads (a good rule of thumb for driving anywhere in NZ is: look at how many miles it is on the map, calculate how fast you could go that far in America, then double the time).
      - khuey 1y ago
        New Zealand doesn't have inland waterways the way the US does so barges don't seem sufficient. They did actually get a fancy self-propelled barge for use transporting minerals on the West Coast of the South Island last year and it got pushed aground by a storm in its first couple weeks of service. It's been sitting in port in Nelson ever since being refloated. https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-to-innovate-new-zealand-coastal-shipping-grounds-in-storm https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-to-innovate-new...
    - cycomanic 1y ago
      The problem about New Zealand is that they hate investing in infrastructure and everyone loves the kiwi myth of the number 8 wire which means they just build provisional solution on top of provisional solution. The example of the ferries is a good one, the cost blow out was because they needed to build a new dock in Wellington. So instead of just living with the fact that yes building infrastructure as become expensive in a country which has seen a massive building boom (like many other places), the new Conservative government decides to cancel the ferry order without any alternative in place, and now the most important connection of the country is running on failing ferries which are more than 25 years old (there have been several incidents in the last couple of years where they were drifting powerless), and (especially considering the massive penalty for cancelling the contract) the new ferries will be just as expensive as the cancelled ones just being much smaller (the old contract was actually signed at quite advantageous economic times) and arriving much later. This is certainly not an example of rail not working. Trucks on the road are a massive disaster as well. Most roads are single lane, so it's not uncommon to be stuck behind trucks for long stretches, this is especially annoying considering that many roads are very windy and truck speed up when coming to passing lanes.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    Trains are as popular as ever almost everywhere in Europe.
    - wahern 1y ago
      Rail freight's share of shipping has been on a steep decline for decades in Europe: > Freight rail’s modal share has been in decline across Europe, both in terms of market share and the profitability of major operators. In France for instance, modal share declined by 50 percent, from around 30 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent today. By contrast, road transport has been steadily increasing. In 1980, less than 50 percent of goods were transported by road. This rose to more than 75 percent by 2018. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/infrastructure/our-insights/bold-moves-to-boost-european-rail-freight https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/infrastructure/our-insig... By contrast, for most of that same period (1980-today) rail freight was growing its share in the US, though in the past decade or so growth has favored trucking.
    - nradov 1y ago
      Trains move as much freight as ever in the USA.
      - gnatolf 1y ago
        Not to take away from that fact, but the share of train-moved freight (over time) is more interesting. It probably highlights the complications of scaling train networks easily.
  - aaomidi 1y ago
    Switzerland?
    - rjsw 1y ago
      Austria, France and Italy are currently copying Switzerland in building base tunnels [1] to mostly carry rail freight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel
- adrr 1y ago
  US is already the largest shipper of freight by train in terms of shipped tonnage and also total tracks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni...
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Not a very interesting data point since it doesn’t account for nation area, utilization, etc.
    - crote 1y ago
      Don't forget geography, and by extension type of freight. The United States doesn't have a lot of navigable waterways, and none go east-west. This means that any bulk goods you want to transport have to go via rail. There is no other option. As a result the railway network has been optimized to do bulk transport at the lowest price possible, even if it means sacrificing speed and quality. After all, coal doesn't care if it sits in a siding for several days. It's true that the US is shipping an awful lot of tonnes via rail, but this doesn't say anything about its ability to ship regular goods. Getting a single wagon from point to point in a timely manner is significantly more complicated than doing the same with an entire train.
    - adrr 1y ago
      https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freight_Shipping_in_the_United_States.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freight_Shipping_in_... Here’s tonnage miles by class. For comparison. There is only 20,000 miles of railway that Amtrak operates on. Thats a fraction of passenger railway compared to China and EU.

nadir_ishiguro 1y ago

Ah, you're thinking of the world famous Las Vegas Hyperloop!

msla 1y ago

Sounds like something that would require a lot of infrastructure that wouldn't make a lot of sense to build in the most rural areas of a country, unlike roads which can be quite cost-effective even without towns nearby.

usrusr 1y ago

Problem is those railroad cars usually don't share origin and destination. And spending a day or two on the switchyard for every couple of hours of actual travel isn't what customers want. The beaty of platooning is that trucks can join and leave while traveling at speed, all they need is a free lane on the side. And if you really want to tease out all the efficiencies of rail, without suffering the drawbacks, you make electrified lanes that also have embedded tracks (like those of a tramway, but designed for higher load) and make the trucks multimodals that can switch while moving. Actually just those trucks that would see an economic advantage, trucks designed for light, high volume loads would likely stick to road wheels only. A setup like this could actually be super economical compared to two because a rail network needs huge separation between trains because rails are terrible for braking fast. Multimodals on the other hand could be designed to be able to switch to their road wheels in an emergency. And a rail network needs an ungodly amount of nines in terms of reliability and rarity of maintenance, because there is no plan B network. Reliability nines are expensive. Multimodals on the other hand could easily be diverted to a dirt road for a bit when the main lanes are defective or going through maintenance. Where they would be running on the same batteries they carry anyways, for the last couple of miles on regular, non-electrified roads.

anigbrowl 1y ago
switchyard Why not just use container cranes like docks? There's no reason they won't work inland.
- dboreham 1y ago
  And indeed they exist every 200 miles or so.
- usrusr 1y ago
  Would that be faster though? You still have to stop the entire train just to get one unit in or out. And if it's more units, chances are that parallelization hits a capacity bottleneck because of the inherent cost trade-off between having lots of cranes on standby vs just waiting a little longer in the rare moments of action. Are container cranes used for routing within a rail network at all? Might well be that they are only ever used for mode change at the edge, despite having been mature and available technology for decades.

floxy 1y ago

So why aren't trains automated yet? I mean, beside the inter-airport shuttles. Seems like a much more constrained set of parameters to deal with. I'd think this would be a good "first" project to tackle for an AV company, even if the economics of replacing locomotive drivers/engineers weren't super compelling. Is it an insurance thing? Because a train wreck could be much more disastrous and costly? Or is it a union thing? Others?

tw04 1y ago
> So why aren't trains automated yet? Why? The labor of a conductor is a fraction of the total cost to move the cargo, to the point it’s a rounding error.
- aaomidi 1y ago
  And the job creates a sense of community too. At some point it’ll probably be automated, but yeah, what’s the point.
- LorenPechtel 1y ago
  And it means someone on site to react sensibly when things go wrong. Think of the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilot said "This is the captain. Brace for impact." The flight attendants picked up on that and immediately began directing the passengers on what "brace for impact" means. Without that how many would have reacted properly (the info is on the safety card, but how many have read it well enough??), how many would be asking for information, how many would just generally be panicking?
  - toast0 1y ago
    If a freight train is unstaffed, who would brace for impact? Anyway, labor costs to have a couple engineers aboard is much less than if the load was travelling by truck, even if the trucks have no driver in them, they're likely supervised at a ratio with more humans than it takes to operate a long freight train.
    - 1y ago

hermitShell 1y ago

Wouldn’t it be great to enable electric cars to go long distances with platoons? Like a bus system for electric cars to go between cities and charge while you drive. The ‘bus’ is basically a big efficient generator that can charge up the cars behind it. A lot like mid flight refueling for fighter jets.

voidspark 1y ago
Generator powered by what? If its a diesel powered generator, that's even less efficient and more polluting than just using diesel trucks in the first place.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  Hydrogen
- hermitShell 1y ago
  As I understand the benefits of electric cars themselves, the burning of hydrocarbons at scale is more efficient than piecemeal. So if the ‘bus’ contained a turbine, there would probably be net benefit. Or a nuclear bus! Plus, even if it’s equal to the present state of affairs, we need a practical road to electrification of transport. I’m sure there are many cheaper options, it’s just fun to think about the infrastructure options.

o11c 1y ago

The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. The existing rail system has at least the following constraints: * Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare. * Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point. * Poor cornering and elevation changing. * Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles) * Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule. * Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb". Which of these can reasonably be changed?

sephamorr 1y ago
My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.
- TrainedMonkey 1y ago
  Always upvote electric trains!
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that. You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

And people could just vote for things to be better!

andrepd 1y ago

It's fascinating the frequency with which techbros invent "trains but worse".

bonoboTP 1y ago

Google Australian road trains.

cco 1y ago

Jokes aside, Germany trialed a hybrid catenary truck system which was really neat. Diesel to get you from the warehouse to the highway, extend your pantograph and boom, you're electric in the right lane (outside lane) all the way to your exit. Never looked into how it penciled out but I always thought that was a great idea. Seems like there is a path to add in driverless aspects to the system as well given you have contact with a wire the whole time.

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
It penciled out by striking it through. Meaning they all have been built back, and aren't in operation anymore, with no further experiments planned. Also disinterest by truck manufacturers.

zer00eyz 1y ago

> next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. You don't need the tracks, and its called a 'road train' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train

IMTDb 1y ago

Yeah! Then those same engineers will notice how much single point of failure that model leads to, and how rigid that is. So they will be looking to leverage the existing much denser, much flexible, more connected and redundant network that exists alongside those rare tracks. It’s almost like this evolution did not happen before.

randunel 1y ago
Imagine having rails instead of roads, and roads instead of rails. The same argument would apply, only roads would lead to less efficiency overall.

Dildonics4All 1y ago

[dead]

rsanek 1y ago

turns out, the US has already done this at a scale larger than anyone else 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...

tim333 1y ago

Trains have been with us for over a century and aren't going to suddenly change on their own to solve all transport problems. Self driving tech may help make them work better by handling the station to end location bit cheaper or more efficiently than human workers.