[WalterBright]

> because heavier vehicles cause more wear and tear for roads

That is true, the fatigue damage to the road goes up as the cube of the weight. What this means is that cars don't cause much fatigue damage to the roads - it's the trucks that do. A semi loaded to the legal limit causes 9,000 times as much damage as a car.

Really, the heavy loads need to go by rail, not highway.

[jazzyjackson]

It really puzzles me, even as a rail fan, how it is said that America’s freight rail is the envy of the world, but in every town there are abandoned tracks pulling right up to downtown warehouses.

It just seems like we let good infrastructure go to waste. It’s probably a tax thing, iirc the rail companies pulled up half their mileage because they were on the hook for property taxes on all that acreage (turned lots of double tracks into single tracks, and old single tracks into recreational bike trails)

[WalterBright]

You're right. The railroads have to pay all the costs associated with the tracks, the truckers shifted those costs onto everyone else.

> old single tracks into recreational bike trails

This is rampant in Seattle. They've not only torn up the tracks and turned them into bike trails, in order to install light rail, they've had to blast new right-of-ways at incredible cost.

[srean]

Couldn't the government lay and maintain the network of tracks and lease them out to the freight companies ?

[loonster]

At least with a bike trail, its much easier to turn it back into rail if needed.

[kilotaras]

> the fatigue damage to the road goes up as the cube of the weight

Slight correction - damage per axle is proportional to 4th power of load per axle. In practice it means slightly less than 4th power of weight (due to semis usually having more axles).

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...