> And that's an understatement

Indeed!

Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.

1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!

2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.

3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.

4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)

5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen

5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust

6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.

7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.

8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.

9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.

10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.

11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.

A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.

> 8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.

Checks out. The residential suburban streets I've lived on have been resurfaced on about that timeframe, maybe a little less, with patch-ups in between. Say, how do the houses on those streets get built without trucking? What about the food in the nearby (much closer than the nearest train line) shops get supplied?

I'm one of those people whose brain works such that that rail and nuclear power plants are how we should be solving problems because I know how good they look to a physicist and engineer, so I am right there with you. But be practical: The guys running the machinery that literally makes society possible deserve to be compensated fairly and I don't see many trucking magnates living large at the rest of our expense.

There are some externalities we can afford to subsidise, and unless you've the stomach for putting in 100x as much public money into rail for a ROI measured in half-centuries, paying for high quality roads that you also get the direct benefit of should grind your gears less than most of the other economic imbalances you could name.

> Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!

That’s puzzles me a loot - there are many countries which hardly have any money for social safety net yet they keep fuel and electricity prices very low as a matter of government (social) policy and poor people benefit the least because they don’t drive and use little electricity.