[noirbot]

Oh sure, but the "haha the US isn't even a third world country with its train system" people already are ignoring scale/density when they're laughing at the US rail systems. I'm past even bothering dealing with that bad faith take.

My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?

[mparkms]

Looks like 73% of freight is moved by truck in the US vs 77% in the EU. Not a big enough difference to really matter I think.

https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068592/eu-road-freight-...

[jcranmer]

The usual metric is ton-kilometers of freight, not gross tonnage. Going by gross tonnage alone overweights the impact of last-kilometer freight, which is almost always by road.

Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.

[reactordev]

Intermodal (hauling shipping containers for trucks to take last-kilometer) is by far America’s biggest freight type. Something like 80% or more of consumer goods go through intermodal or road on their way to distribution centers that load it onto trucks that deliver it to the store (or your home).

For rail alone it looks like 50/50. 50% is resources and dry goods, oil and gas, and the rest is consumer goods, boxcar, flatcar, intermodal. [1]

[1] https://www.aar.org/topic/industries-we-support/#!

[hnaccount_rng]

But the density in the US is not _that_ different. Sure if you take the average over the whole country or states like Texas or Arizona then you end up with numbers. But the north east of the US is comparably densely populated to Western Europe. And even parts of California/the west coast are similarly densely populated. Albeit with larger separations between population centers. Which, as a German, does not sound so bad, given that our high-speed rail has to stop every 30mins because the next city just isn’t that far away.

Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.

On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)

So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less

[Gare]

> How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?

Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.

Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).