this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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I like the idea that bus just magically floats to the destination as if roads are any cheaper to maintain than railway.
And I suppose you assume that cars will just float magically if you build a railroad?
Am french, can confirm they do that here
Roads are used for a lot more traffic than rails.
So if you break it down by traveler, it's much cheaper and more flexible.
Abandon roads, move everything by trains?
Do they ? You state that roads are carrying more traffic than rails as obvious but I am not certain it's true.
I'm not sure what would be the best metric so I decided to compare the number of passagers on the most used road in France with the most used rail line, that are both in Paris.
The most used road is the Autoroute urbaine Nord with 200 000 vehicles per day.
The most used rail line is the RER A with 1 400 000 daily passengers, 7 times more.
This is called survivor bias.
If you remove every train line except the RER A, would you say that trains are always less expensive than every roads? That would be the logical conclusion 🤣
You have to look at the lines that disappeared, to see that they likely had very few users and the costs were therefore much higher.