[WalterBright]

> If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used

There's everyone else who uses the road, too.

Lots of railroads were built with private money for various purposes.

These days, even the government doesn't seem capable of building railroads. There's Caltrain, and in Seattle it's taking decades to build a few miles of light rail, at a cost that exceeds the GDP of Norway. Well, maybe not quite that much (!) but it sure seems like it.

[sirponm]

Walmart uses it a lot more than I do. Civeng principles show that road damage rises to the fourth power of axle weight, a fully loaded tractor-trailer does roughly 10k times structural damage of a passenger car but they definitely don't pay that amount.

And yeah the government is consistently incompetent. But there's no incentive for them to be competent in the first place. Either a mostly exempt-from-competiton company does it badly or a fully exempt-from-competition state does it badly in our system.

[WalterBright]

I know about the fatigue damage problem, and have advocated that higher taxes should be put on the trucks.

Anyhow, the most efficient travel for freight is by rail. But due to all the mismanagement by the government, it remains cheaper to ship by truck. You cannot really blame capitalism for that.

[IAmBroom]

... until you realize that the government is just reacting to lobbying by trucking concerns, which are driven by capitalist greed.

[WalterBright]

The failure of government is a failure of government, not capitalism.

[rickydroll]

Railroads are a natural monopoly, as are highways, power lines, last-mile internet, etc. Once you have a railway in place, it is rarely profitable to have a single competitor, let alone the three or four you would need for a genuinely competitive market.

[WalterBright]

Railroads, like airliners, form a network. There are multiple paths to the same destination. There are also competitors in the form of waterways, air corridors, and highways.

Before the government began regulating the railroads, this is exactly what happened (though no air corridors then!).

Power lines also form a grid, and can route around failures. The power to my house got a lot more reliable when the other side of the neighborhood got connected to the grid.

When the power does go down, so does the cable internet, but the internet still works because the cell towers take over the last mile traffic. There's also Starlink.

[rickydroll]

One would think it's the same, but it's not. Each leg of a route is unique. Travel time, distance, and stops on the way. They are not interchangeable.

Practical example: a former customer of mine had a specific route carved out for transporting fruit and vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast. They had exactly one time slot in the day they could take, which brought the travel time down to about 3-5 days. If they missed that time slot, it was up over 10 days. If one of the route segments was out of service, it could have been two weeks or more. Yeah, you could get from point A to point B, but the time made the alternative routes unacceptable.

The power grid is not sufficiently redundant to protect against many forms of damage. Find power substations and count how many 10 kVA lines feed each substation. Then ask yourself, what happens when that substation goes down because a good old boy decided to take potshots at the transformers? When there's a natural disaster like a winter storm here in Boston, there are a lot of power outages, indicating that the grid is not a grid but a lot of branches.

As for the last mile, no, cell towers don't take over for my FiOS fiber when it fails, nor does Starlink. Cell, fiber, cable, and Starlink are not expanding the market for internet access. The cable market, the internet end-user market, is mostly saturated. Users switch but do not duplicate the service.

FWIW, this is another example of you never eliminate single points of failure, you only move them.

[WalterBright]

Oh, I agree that alternatives can cost more money, but they are still there.

Roads go out or are down for maintenance. People use alternate routes. Happens all the time.

And yes, the last time the power went out at my house I connected to the internet via cell phone. Google says that Starlink provides internet access.

P.S. I also have a generator, as do my neighbors, because the power grid here is unreliable. Alternatives exist.

[rickydroll]

It's not just that they may cost more, but constraints on the alternatives may render them unsuitable.Maybe your fruit will rot, maybe your hotspot use consume your data allocation, maybe your generator only produces enough power to keep the refrigerator/freezer running and the house heat on, or maybe the ambulance can't get you to the hospital in time.

There's a saying in real-time systems out a late answer is the same as a wrong answer. In this situation, a solution that does not satisfy all the constraints is the same as no solution.

[gsf_emergency_6]

On the East Coast, the NYC subway could be one example of enshittification running the course. It started with competing private companies.. now if they'd go into real estate like the Tokyo metro