Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains.
There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.
My lazy googling suggests that 40% of freight movement is via rail in US. I can't find a full breakout, but the same site goes on to claim rail is only 1.7% of GHG, which means most of the rest is traveling by road, since waterborne freight is generally more efficient than rail.
In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?).
Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric interstates could allow NY to LA in one shot and pulling off the highway with 100 miles to make the round-trip to wherever a load needed to be dropped off.
If attaching and detaching was automatic, there would be no need to electrify onramps or intersections or underpasses or anything expensive, just find the cheapest, straightest, easiest to electrify 80% of roads and slap up wires there.
If paved roads, then you're forgetting the enormous wear that heavy vehicles put on road surfaces (which would get much worse as labor costs were taken away as a downward pressure on road freight volume.)
If rail, then I think you could see some version of that as a logical upgrade to a high-utilization rail network in a high-trust society with a strong safety culture. I see the US becoming lower-, not higher-, trust.
Towns and cities are too large and too dense and too insanely expensive in terms of property prices to get new lines into or even close to.
(This might be less of a problem for freight compared to moving people, but many lines are mixed freight/passenger use, aren't they?)
In reality, such a series of actions could only exist in a society that got seriously focused on moving away from private auto, and that means density would increasingly be in style. As soon as the NIMBY floodgates came down, property prices would plummet in all but the smallest cores of desirable areas, since it would be readily apparent that you can't build all expensive areas to the level of intensity that justifies insane land values seen in sprawling cities.
Again, we could, but I recognize that we don't. Let's just not say that we can't.
This reminds me of many high GDP parts of Europe where there are towns of 500-1000 people every few km, connected by rail and busses.
But, yes, you would expect to see significant clustering. Nonetheless, the most effective clustering since the advent of indoor plumbing is the cluster of clusters, the city, and I doubt that would change. The connectivity is just so much better than a lineal expansion of small towns along a corridor.
I agree time wouldnt change that much, but presumably that time would translate to greater distances with better throughput and speed.
FWIW, I agree that electric trucking is the future, just disagree how close we are to that as a reality. My main gripe is how the problem tends to get oversimplified in people's assessment. "All you gotta do is.." is usually a red flag when talking about complicated problems. I'd argue that if it were simple, it would have been done already.
Trucks spend a lot of time loading, unloading and on mandatory driver rest breaks. Charging can and will be done during those times.
The biggest expense in a trucking operation is diesel. Trucking has cut-throat margins. Once electrification starts in the industry, everyone will switch quickly, or go bankrupt. Some routes will be hard to electrify, but the cost savings on the rest will be worth a lot more than a little bit of inconvenience.
It's not easy, but the savings will incentivize overcoming the obstacles.
The point is, it's a lot of money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most economists would say it makes the most sense to get that money from the people who most use the roads. That sounds like a mileage tax, tolls, or some other mechanism. I don't see why EVs would get a (literal) free ride here.
If California wanted to collect similar revenue, that 0.15 would be about 35% of the operational fuel cost.
It'll be more likely if a high amperage grid connection is also expensive at the charger location. A battery and a low amperage connection can replace a high amperage connection for an infrequently used charger.
The more conditionals that get levied the farther off the solution seems to be and the less of a slam dunk electrification appears. They're solvable, but I think it's reasonable to expect a cost and timeline for each of those before we start touting electrification as a great solution just on the horizon.
The original claim was: out of planes, trains, and automobiles, the only one that's a problem are planes.
Short answer: It's solvable, but a heck of a lot more complicated than that statement lets on.
Even if you insist that big-box retailers represent the peak of retail capitalism, is it so difficult to imagine that these might be placed along a central corridor with rail running along the back, each store able to pluck the intermodals off the flatbed car, and load empties back onto it? Spaced out so that every business could unload at the same time?
Everyone's always bitching about cars and how they've made things awful. But how much traffic/carbon/misery would we eliminate if freight were taken off the highways?