> but highways and automobiles took over

The reasons for this are complicated and nuanced though.

Governments think they push the financial burden of transport maintenance on the people (and its a good tool to register and control people too, but thats not a strong consideration I wouldn’t wager), so they fervently cut spending on public transport and curtail cycling infrastructure in favour of cars.

But roads themselves operate at a crazy financial loss and are one of the reasons governments are in crazy debt (which nobody wants to acknowledge).

This is because road maintenance is significantly more expensive than building new roads. Which means that road use becomes heavily subsidised (much more than trains cost per user) but the cost of vehicle ownership, despite that heavy subsidy, is still enormous and one of the largest expenses an average person can have.

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skylurk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The reasons for this are complicated and nuanced though.

Is it? People love to have personal sovereignty over their transportation, given the choice.

	▲	badestrand an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know why it's treated as an exclusive choice. IMO they complement each other well. Take public transport where convenient, else take the car.

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BoingBoomTschak 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You have to understand that road wear is governed by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

"The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) is a rule of thumb which states that the damage to the road caused by a motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load. This law was discovered in the course of a series of scientific experiments in the United States in the late 1950s and was decisive for the development of standard construction methods in road construction."

"Example: Car (total weight 2 tonnes, 2 axles): load per axle: 1 tonnes vs Truck (total weight 30 tonnes, 3 axles): load per axle: 10 tonnes. [...] The resulting damage differential between truck and car is 15,000 to 1"

PS: this is something electric car proponents don't talk much about

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RugnirViking 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

worth noting that many electric cars weigh 2 tons or thereabout, like the car in your example. internal combustion cars tend to be lighter than that

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kalaksi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> PS: this is something electric car proponents don't talk much about. In France, we're getting a "car weight tax" too (https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F3...).

I hope trucks transporting fuel for ICEs get equal treatment.

	▲	BoingBoomTschak 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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eastbound 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

- In Europe the petrol taxes pay for road maintenance. Only electric vehicles operate at a loss.

- Train capacity is much, much higher. You couldn't have the density of France, the Netherlands or even NYC without most people travelling by train. LA struggles with 1/10th of the density.

	▲	dijit 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Europe is a large disparate continent, but I don’t know any country (neither Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Finland or the UK) that covers road maintenance costs with fuel levies. In fact in the UK you would be forced to aggregate all fuel and road tax and offset it against road maintenance because there is no direct correlation to be made, as tax is “one big bucket”. The majority of the planet are going from one point of interest to another at a relative constant rate- but yes people are spread further and further- ironically this is helped by requiring huge parking space everywhere anyone needs to go, and needing huge houses so you can park multiple cars outside. Its a self-reinforcing problem. (This is most evident when comparing cities like Malmö in Sweden with Orlando, FL. Malmö has a higher total population but approximately 1/20th the road surface- yet in Orlando I kept bumping into the same people everywhere I went because we’d all drive to the same Restaurants and Shops; and despite that happening we had to drive 20-25 minutes to get there! Weird coincidence or natural concentration points? Someone smarter than me would have to say).