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Comment by Heliosmaster | Hacker News Reader

Or rail, which is vastly more efficient than trucks (which then could be used only for last-mile)

The US has more rail than any other country in the world. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...

miles of track per square mile, or alternatively, miles of track per square mile of population above N-per-unit-area would be a much more meaningful statistic.

I'm not sure population is too important here, that stat would just make dense countries look 'better'. In reality if you want to ship something from California to DC by Rail, it really doesn't matter that 95% of those 3000 miles have almost no one living nearby.

We're talking about Semi Trucks here, so clearly this conversation is in regards to cargo.

Hence my second proposed statistic.

"3000 miles of track to service land holding 60 million people" vs. "100,000 miles of track to service land holding 50 million people".

(the numbers are invented, not real)

Hence my first proposed comment, "that stat would just make dense countries look 'better'".

The U.S has a lot of empty land, so this would just be a manufactured stat with arguable meaning.

No, it wouldn't because the only land that would "count" would have more than N people per square mile. So in the US, North Dakota would barely count for anything.

The cost of the vehicle is irrelevant for autonomy, what's important is the cost of the driver. And for a freight train a mile long, that is pretty negligable. For a taxi carrying one passenger, not so much.

Europe has rail. Does anyone know if they use fewer trucks than in the US?

US uses more rail than Europe for cargo (and the opposite is true for passengers).

Yeah, I don’t think people really grok that. They think “US hates rail, Europe loves it,” but this only applies to passenger travel and for freight, it’s flipped.

Maybe part of the reason the US has less passenger rail is because freight rail is prioritized and we use airplanes and automobiles instead due to the vast distances between many of the population centers and the lower overall population density (a given random two geographic locations will have fewer people moving between them and therefore will be tougher to justify passenger rail). Also, sea transport between different coasts of Europe is a little easier than between East and West Coast in the US because you don’t need to go through the Panama Canal. Then again, the US does have a very good inter coastal waterway and good navigable rivers both via the Mississippi and through the Great Lakes (thanks, Canada!).

I'm not sure we do (whatever we normalize by to compare the 2 big areas), freight trains are not big in Europe, because of size. Our most populous and wealthy countries are next to each other. For trains, you need to amortize the cost of loading/unloading.

basically if it's worth it to put it on slow transportation "coast to coast" we have a single continuous boat path between the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, whereas the US does have to think twice when sending a ton of things from LA to Texas, it's either train or Panama Canal.

Rail is rarely used for freight in smaller countries, because you have to move it to trucks anyway to get it moved the last 0 - 200km anyway. So if the country is only 400km wide, you’re wasting to much time load and unloading.

This but also the _first_ 0-200 km. Many manufacturers (especially small and medium size) are located far away from major rail networks.

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