This is not something that is even a little debated. Rail is more efficient. Ship is even more efficient but since most of those are coming from redic far if your comparing overseas to local that is a different issue. But mile for mile and ton for ton should be ship, then rail, then road.
Not the question asked, but relevant: When each individual enterprise considers its own transport needs, road transport is usually cheaper. However, when looking at the collective needs of an entire economy, rail is usually a way more efficient and cost-effective option.
Private rail companies will only invest where there are epic amounts of cargo or passengers to move, which when left to the private sector leads to massive under investment and over-reliance on road transport. There is no coherent argument against having extensive government investment in rail.
Road use is subsidized, as the trucks who weight much more do pay a little more in licensing and gasoline to fund road maintenance, but nowhere near to the level of their added wear-and-tear.
Rail use has no subsidy.
There's the math.
Yeah... You're not speaking generally, are you? Because in most EU countries, rail ise is subsidised.
If you need the bare minimum connection, a road is cheaper than a railroad. At scale, a railroad is cheaper than a road.
The ancillary equipment and infrastructure for a railroad influences things quite a bit as well. If you just need to privately move things from A to B, it is "theoretically" cheaper to lay rails than build a road of equivalent capability. But a locomotive and cars plus a railyard and a turntable and sidings and switches and all the other stuff you'll need to run trains effectively is going to cost a lot more than just getting a box truck or a even an 18 wheeler and just plonking it on your new road.
A modern freight locomotive will cost you $1.5m to $2m just by itself. Then you need boxcars and all the other stuff, too. Big rigs aren't exactly cheap, either, but you can drive one of those off the lot for less than $250,000.
Connecting your railroad to the rest of the railroad network -- a significant portion of which is privately owned, for an extra special added layer of clusterfuck -- is also a headache. This is trivial for roads, even after you take all of your local government regulations into account. You can make roads go more places more easily.
You are correct that scale is a very important factor for the financial viability of a railroad.
Plus the final mile from the rail to destination.
We really should have nationalized the entire rail infrastructure, just like we did with highways and airports.
But your analogy is incomplete. If you count things like rail yards, you should count rest areas and distributions centers and service centers. Doesn’t really change anything though: it’s a question of scale, weight and distance
Airports aren't nationalized in the USA. They are usually set up by local governments to facilitate trade.
The FAA must be an hallucination then. There is no ATC, no TSA, no ILS, no airways or airspace, no radar or radios.
Sure airlines might pay for their own parking and facilities, might pay for a cushy spot to place your butt while you wait. They might pay for things that you the sheep see as you’re herded this way and that, but none of that is important to flying
Yes, we probably should have.
But meanwhile, my point was that due to their inflexibility you absolutely cannot operate rail vehicles without the ancillary equipment required to perform certain tasks. It's not as easy as saying, "It costs x per mile for railroad tracks therefore everything should be trains." That doesn't tell the whole story, and all of those add-ons are, in fact, mandatory.
With a steerable roadgoaing vehicle you can work around much of it if necessary. Rest areas and even traffic controls and guard rails are not actually technically necessary for a vehicle to successfully go down the road and you can wing it re: parking lots by parking in the dirt if you have to, and so on. The whole arrangement would certainly be horrid without those things but it can and does still work. There are thousands of miles of rural roads in America alone that are served by absolutely no external infrastructure except stationary signs and some guard rails.
However, you cannot turn a locomotive around no matter how much redneck creativity you apply unless you have turntable, a loop track with a switch, or a big crane... period. You cannot add or remove cars from a train without a long enough spur or a railyard, and in many cases a second "yard" locomotive, period. You cannot have one train pass another without a siding, period. You cannot store currently unused cars without a railyard full of tracks, period. A train cannot change tracks without a switch and someone (or some computer) to man it, period. Etc., etc.
During the initial railroad boom this was actually a very real problem. Anyone who was anyone and who was rich enough wanted to have their own little spur railway going to their factory or estate, and it turned out that the logistical clusterfuck and ancillary equipment needed to serve all of those individual low volume needs was so expensive and was such a hassle that the very moment trucks were viable the huge majority of all those little endpoints were abandoned and demolished pretty much overnight. Rail has an insurmountable problem with the final mile, and the more individual locations it has to serve the more untenable the ballooning cost becomes in both money and space, which must be counterbalanced by a sufficient economic benefit.
Where trains excel is by moving a whole shitload of people or product from one source to one destination, which unsurprisingly is almost exclusively how they are used outside of the context of intra-city people movers like subways and surface light rail. Within the confines of this use case they are cheaper and more efficient per unit of cargo moved than cars or trucks.
I am struggling to find a source, but the tradeoff between road and railways scales with congestion. The infrastructure needed for moving 1000 trucks per hour on a road is much more expensive than 1 truck per hour. Rails, however, scale much more easily, as the freightline is typically closely managed already.
Technically the cost of the actual rail infrastructure is less. It requires much less width for the corridor and both road and rail need roughly equal strengthening for the foundations. Overhead lines and signalling are not a significant incremental cost so long as you have an existing network.
However, you generally only build rail where there is sufficient latent demand. This means the land you require is of higher value and land is one of the most significant costs assuming you would need equal infrastructure requirements (e.g. bridges, structures, tunnels, etc.) regardless of mode.
Therefore, on a per kilometre basis, rail is often more expensive. The key difference is throughput. Rail is highly efficient for both freight and passenger movements, over sufficient distances, because it is a fixed corridor with right of way or full segregation. A dual track railway can carry far more tonnes of freight or many multiples more people than a dual lane road as it doesn’t suffer from congestion.
Technically the cost of the actual rail infrastructure is less
At least in America the problem is we gave our rail system to freight companies. Which is why the few passenger trains may have to pull over and wait for hours for a 5mph freight to pass instead of freight waiting for a much smaller, much faster passenger train.
But instead of maintaining the rail lines, the freight companies wait for a crash that insurance pays for them the government to repair it
So "cheaper" is a very deep question
The other comments correctly mention aspects like managing terrain and the width of railroads vs roadways. What I want to highlight is the development of road building methods at around the same time that metal-on-metal rail developed.
The 1800s were a wild time. Some clever folks figured out that they could put a contemporary steam engine -- invented early 1700s; used only for stationary uses in lieu of water power -- onto a wagonway. Wagonways are basically wooden or metal guides/flanges so that a horse-drawn wagon could be pulled along and stay perfectly centered on the path.
Up until this point in history, the construction of graded, flattened surfaces for moving goods didn't change very much compared to what the Romans were doing with their roads. That is, a road had to be dug down and some soil removed, then backfilled with coarse material (usually large stones), and then a layer of smaller stones to try to approximate a smooth surface. The innovations the Roman introduced included a keen eye for drainage -- freeze/thaw cycles destroy roads -- and surveying methods (also to build things like aqueducts and canals). And concrete, of course.
But even the best built roads of that era were still prone to rutting, where each passing wagon slowly wears a groove into the road. Wooden wagons wider or narrower than the groove would suffer poor performance or outright break down. The wagonways sought to solve that issue by: 1) forcing all wagons to fit within the fixed guides on the sides, and 2) concentrate the grooves to exactly within the guides. The modern steel-on-steel railway takes this idea to its logical end.
An adhesive railroad seeks to be: all-weather, heavy duty, and efficient. Like Roman roads before it, all railways (except maybe on-street tramways) need to excavate the soil and build it up, usually being higher and wider than the rest of the land. It also minimizes the width of the earthworks, by being so compact and building upward. This sturdy base also provides a strong foundation to support heavy loads, preventing the steel rails from sinking or "rutting". And finally, putting the wheel atop the rail makes for low-friction operation. Early wooden plateways sort-of did this, but they didn't manage curves like how modern rails do.
All the while, instead of trying to support heavy wagons, another clever person sought to reinvent road building outright, postulating that if a surface could just spread out the load from light/medium traffic, then the soil beneath could be used as-is, saving a lot of earthworks. A gravel surface would meet this criteria, but gravel is not all-weather and can develop rutting. The key innovation was the use of binder (basically glue) to hold the surface together, such as tar. This sealing process meant the surface wouldn't shift underneath traffic. This neatly avoided the issue of dust, made the surface water impermeable, and reduced road maintenance. So famous is this surfacing process that the inventor's name can still be found in the surface for airport runways, despite runways always being excavated down to a significant depth.
So on one hand, rail technology developed to avoid all the pitfalls of 1700s roads. On the other hand, road surfacing developed to allow light/medium traffic roads to be economically paved for all-weather conditions. Both developments led to increased speed and efficiency in their domain, and networks of both would be built out.
Rail networks made it possible to develop the "streetcar suburbs" around major historical cities in the late 1800s. But on the same token, cheap road surfacing made it possible to build 1950s American suburbs, with wide, pedestrian-hostile streets sprawling in serpentine patterns. The fact that sealed roads are water impermeable has also substantially contributed to water pollution, due to increased rain runoff rather than absorbing into the underlying soil.
High quality post 👍
Road, technically, at least in the context of having enough of it to transport cargo. I.e. not neighborhood streets. On a raw mile-per-mile basis, it's cheaper to build railways.
I’m curious about rail transporting everything as was the case in the 1800s
This was the case because in the 1800's no one had successfully invented rubber tires, or more importantly from a functional standpoint no one had come up with a good way to make powered vehicles climb inclines. Trains are still famously bad at this because they all run on metal-on-metal wheels and rails. Rubber tires afford grip to allow cars and importantly trucks to go up hills. (In America, a large part of encompassing the continent with rails during that Wild West era was dealing with the three giant arrays of mountains in the way: The Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierras/Cascades. This required an immense amount of effort in tunneling and building bridges to enable trains to cross these areas.)
Roads don't have this problem nearly as much. Therefore the cost/benefit ratio is quite different on relatively flat ground versus having to overcome valleys and mountains. Roads also have the advantage of being significantly more versatile than rails. Traffic control of multiple entities going to a wide array of different destinations is way easier on roads, and roads can theoretically be accessed by just about any vehicle e.g. in the case of an emergency. This is not the case with rail, which is compatible with only one type of vehicle which can't steer or go around obstacles and is incredibly difficult to even put on said rails on short notice in the first place.
Anyway:
A mile of modern road costs roughly between $5m and $6m depending on where you build it. Surprisingly, the width of said road doesn't change the cost that much since the majority of the cost is in fact labor, and not materials, and the difference in clearing, say, a 24 foot wide patch of land versus a 48 foot patch of land is usually pretty trivial when you compare that to the length of the land you'll have to clear while you're at it.
A mile of double track rail (i.e. roughly analogous with a normal highway in that traffic can travel in both directions) costs between about $2.2m and $3m. There's a handy chart here, including rough maintenance costs as well. However, I strongly suspect this does not include the cost of boring tunnels through miles of mountains, or having to build a bridge span a quarter of a mile high that's capable of supporting a freight train...
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world knows some shit yo
The City Nerd channel on YouTube and Nebula discusses this issue a LOT. Trains are by far the most cost effective method of transporting large numbers of people and goods.
Here's a video discussing costs of car use
Here's one on the cities with the most affordable housing and transportation costs. As he explains housing and transportation costs are directly linked to each other.
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