• frezik@midwest.social
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    11 months ago

    which I don’t think it has, I highly doubt a mile of tracks costs more than a mile of road, especially long term

    It does. Highway costs around $10M/mile, and rail (without tunnels) close to $120M/mile. We also don’t need to build many new highways, while our aging rail infrastructure needs a lot of work just to get what we have up to snuff before we even talk about new rail.

    Mostly, this comes down to things that go away with experience. Get rail projects going en mass and the problem will go away. That said, hooking up every town along the route is only going to make the initial build out worse.

        • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          well the good news is that while you accounted for costs going down once projects are built, you also failed to consider the difference in capacity between railroad tracks and roads and also the maintenance costs that are gonna be much higher for roads.

          so even if it’s more expensive upfront which it really isn’t, it’s so much better long term

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            11 months ago

            Of course it’s more expensive up front. That’s trivially true when we have highways and not high speed rail.