Do roads have to go more places? Are they dramatically cheaper and easier to make and cheaper to maintain than train tracks? Or do we just already have a bunch of them?
Mind you I'm not taking about last-mile dirt road up a mountain to one family, but the massive arteries with enormous throughput that constitute the vast majority of lbs/mile of shipping.
Railroads have much much stricter requirements with respect to maximum allowed curvature and slope. So yes roads can go far more places than rails can.
Mind you I'm not taking about last-mile dirt road up a mountain to one family, but the massive arteries with enormous throughput that constitute the vast majority of lbs/mile of shipping.