I appreciate the suggestion. Not sure I am a fan of this implementation though. It looks near identical to the HTMX JS API that is already backed into HTMX. Most of the annoyances I dealt with were around conditional logic based on validation.
After enough of the HTMX JS API, I figured, "What is HTMX even buying me at this point?" Even if plain JS is more verbose, that verbosity comes with far less opinions and constraints.
next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. And then we could move them off the highways and onto specialized "tracks" that guarantee they don't deviate from the planned routes.
speculative, alien technology, admittedly, but some day our scientists will figure it out i bet!
The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
The existing rail system has at least the following constraints:
* Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare.
* Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point.
* Poor cornering and elevation changing.
* Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles)
* Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule.
* Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb".
My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.
I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that.
You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network.
It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.
>the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics
I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...)
They can all be changed, but then the capital costs for rail infrastructure would balloon and diminish the 3-5x cost advantage rail has over trucking. The modern rail business is structured (physically and, especially, financially) to squeeze every last cent out of existing infrastructure with minimal investment. I doubt that will change significantly anytime soon. The public road infrastructure subsidizes trucking (even after factoring in use and fuel taxes), and perhaps more importantly trucking companies don't have to contend with legal hurdles like land acquisition--the government handles that. (Land acquisition delays have been the biggest barrier for CAHSR.)
>The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
Because companies have invested in JIT because low cost of trucking, an industry which is heavily subsidized (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049), allows it.
If trucking costs reflected their true cost, railroad would look a ton more attractive along with not doing JIT.
You can. It’s called multimodal and basically is just picking a shipping container off a train car with a crane and putting it on a truck platform or a ship. 1 platform supports all modes.
This works great for finished consumer goods, but bulk cargo that makes up a significant portion of both rail and truck traffic like grain, liquid products (crude oil, gasoline, vinyl chloride), ore, etc. have very specialized transports that don't work well with the existing multimodal system.
The problem with rail is that we allowed the national rail network to be privatized. Maybe we’ll see some privatized lanes on interstate highways in the next 15 years.
The bigger issue is that roads are immensely subsidised compared to rail. Even on private roads that are completely covered by usage charges, trucks pay maybe a factor of 2-10 more than cars, however they cause about 40000 times more wear (let's even disregard how they also cause disproportionately more traffic...). Obviously this calculation becomes even worse if we consider that most roads are subsidised by all tax payers. Trucks would be much less profitable (especially for long haul traffic) if they would have to cover their actual cost to society. But they are just another example of privatising profits and socialising the costs.
The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway.
The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
France has fairly high tolls on roads and Switzerland has that sticker you have to buy to use the expressways.
Japanese rail companies must get some sort of subsidy on tracks, the passenger rail system runs at a loss and only turns a profit on renting space in train stations. Roads are also heavily tolled (similar in China).
that 40000 figure is the product of one study. I have always been suspicious of it and wished people could cite more than one study written 40+ years ago
> I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
A century ago they would have found it at lot easier: if you wanted to send just a few cars to the back of a factory, many rail operators would have found a way to make it happen, and at a reasonable price too - now they’ll tell you the service is uneconomic to provide, unless you charter an entire locomotive for $$$$
As repairing roads costs so much, it annoys me that we don't make some attempt at penalising the heaviest vehicles. As road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, it would make a lot of sense to prevent logistics companies from just using the largest vehicles that they can - it should work out costing less if loads are broken up and delivered via multiple, lighter vehicles. However, as the public bears the cost, it means that logistics companies will just look at their expenses (drivers' wages, fuel etc).
Problem is those railroad cars usually don't share origin and destination. And spending a day or two on the switchyard for every couple of hours of actual travel isn't what customers want.
The beaty of platooning is that trucks can join and leave while traveling at speed, all they need is a free lane on the side.
And if you really want to tease out all the efficiencies of rail, without suffering the drawbacks, you make electrified lanes that also have embedded tracks (like those of a tramway, but designed for higher load) and make the trucks multimodals that can switch while moving. Actually just those trucks that would see an economic advantage, trucks designed for light, high volume loads would likely stick to road wheels only.
A setup like this could actually be super economical compared to two because a rail network needs huge separation between trains because rails are terrible for braking fast. Multimodals on the other hand could be designed to be able to switch to their road wheels in an emergency. And a rail network needs an ungodly amount of nines in terms of reliability and rarity of maintenance, because there is no plan B network. Reliability nines are expensive. Multimodals on the other hand could easily be diverted to a dirt road for a bit when the main lanes are defective or going through maintenance. Where they would be running on the same batteries they carry anyways, for the last couple of miles on regular, non-electrified roads.
Would that be faster though? You still have to stop the entire train just to get one unit in or out. And if it's more units, chances are that parallelization hits a capacity bottleneck because of the inherent cost trade-off between having lots of cranes on standby vs just waiting a little longer in the rare moments of action. Are container cranes used for routing within a rail network at all? Might well be that they are only ever used for mode change at the edge, despite having been mature and available technology for decades.
Hmm. That sounds like it might lead to a monopolization of these tracks, as networks consolidate, and then ultimately evolve into a stagnant industry more focused on cutting costs than innovating...
I suspect that's why a competent government might invest more in these tracks as they might contribute a lot to delivery infrastructure. Especially in a consumer-based economy where shipping goods is important.
Don't forget geography, and by extension type of freight.
The United States doesn't have a lot of navigable waterways, and none go east-west. This means that any bulk goods you want to transport have to go via rail. There is no other option. As a result the railway network has been optimized to do bulk transport at the lowest price possible, even if it means sacrificing speed and quality. After all, coal doesn't care if it sits in a siding for several days.
It's true that the US is shipping an awful lot of tonnes via rail, but this doesn't say anything about its ability to ship regular goods. Getting a single wagon from point to point in a timely manner is significantly more complicated than doing the same with an entire train.
Let me know where you can find a competent government not currently trying to burn down its own consumer-based economy with tariffs and xenophobia and which doesn't consider trains a communist plot. And whether they take American passports.
Rail freight's share of shipping has been on a steep decline for decades in Europe:
> Freight rail’s modal share has been in decline across Europe, both in terms of market share and the profitability of major operators. In France for instance, modal share declined by 50 percent, from around 30 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent today. By contrast, road transport has been steadily increasing. In 1980, less than 50 percent of goods were transported by road. This rose to more than 75 percent by 2018.
By contrast, for most of that same period (1980-today) rail freight was growing its share in the US, though in the past decade or so growth has favored trucking.
Not to take away from that fact, but the share of train-moved freight (over time) is more interesting. It probably highlights the complications of scaling train networks easily.
I'm not sure governments learn by seeing the mistakes of other governments. But consecutive New Zealand governments have made some big mistakes. Capitalist party sold the national rail to an Australian company because rail was inefficient and costing a ton. Privately run cut back staff significantly. A few years later the story was that that was failing privately run, so the socialist party bought it back at exhorbitant cost. Now current governmentis trying to sort out a massive budget blow-out to get "rail" ferries between North and South Islands working (roll-on roll-off). The private ferry (Bluebridge) is doing okay I think.
I believe the lesson is that rail sucks here, economically speaking (whether privately run or publicly run). Unfortunately old voters love rail so the politicians pander to them.
The problem about New Zealand is that they hate investing in infrastructure and everyone loves the kiwi myth of the number 8 wire which means they just build provisional solution on top of provisional solution. The example of the ferries is a good one, the cost blow out was because they needed to build a new dock in Wellington. So instead of just living with the fact that yes building infrastructure as become expensive in a country which has seen a massive building boom (like many other places), the new Conservative government decides to cancel the ferry order without any alternative in place, and now the most important connection of the country is running on failing ferries which are more than 25 years old (there have been several incidents in the last couple of years where they were drifting powerless), and (especially considering the massive penalty for cancelling the contract) the new ferries will be just as expensive as the cancelled ones just being much smaller (the old contract was actually signed at quite advantageous economic times) and arriving much later.
This is certainly not an example of rail not working. Trucks on the road are a massive disaster as well. Most roads are single lane, so it's not uncommon to be stuck behind trucks for long stretches, this is especially annoying considering that many roads are very windy and truck speed up when coming to passing lanes.
Dumb American, so I could be totally off base. But New Zealand appears small enough on the map that just doing a shit ton of barges along defined coastal water routes makes a lot more sense than trains. In the US trains could be efficient, but we are also like 2,500 miles coast to coast.
The problem with water travel in New Zealand is that weather often closes ports.
But it is true that NZ lacks the scale that many existing rail systems rely on, and also lacks high-speed roads (a good rule of thumb for driving anywhere in NZ is: look at how many miles it is on the map, calculate how fast you could go that far in America, then double the time).
New Zealand doesn't have inland waterways the way the US does so barges don't seem sufficient. They did actually get a fancy self-propelled barge for use transporting minerals on the West Coast of the South Island last year and it got pushed aground by a storm in its first couple weeks of service. It's been sitting in port in Nelson ever since being refloated.
Jokes aside, Germany trialed a hybrid catenary truck system which was really neat.
Diesel to get you from the warehouse to the highway, extend your pantograph and boom, you're electric in the right lane (outside lane) all the way to your exit.
Never looked into how it penciled out but I always thought that was a great idea. Seems like there is a path to add in driverless aspects to the system as well given you have contact with a wire the whole time.
Yeah! Then those same engineers will notice how much single point of failure that model leads to, and how rigid that is. So they will be looking to leverage the existing much denser, much flexible, more connected and redundant network that exists alongside those rare tracks.
It’s almost like this evolution did not happen before.
So why aren't trains automated yet? I mean, beside the inter-airport shuttles. Seems like a much more constrained set of parameters to deal with. I'd think this would be a good "first" project to tackle for an AV company, even if the economics of replacing locomotive drivers/engineers weren't super compelling. Is it an insurance thing? Because a train wreck could be much more disastrous and costly? Or is it a union thing? Others?
Didn't we almost see a national rail strike 2 years ago? It seems like reducing that risk would be an incentive enough to make the transition, even if overall costs are low.
And it means someone on site to react sensibly when things go wrong.
Think of the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilot said "This is the captain. Brace for impact." The flight attendants picked up on that and immediately began directing the passengers on what "brace for impact" means. Without that how many would have reacted properly (the info is on the safety card, but how many have read it well enough??), how many would be asking for information, how many would just generally be panicking?
If a freight train is unstaffed, who would brace for impact?
Anyway, labor costs to have a couple engineers aboard is much less than if the load was travelling by truck, even if the trucks have no driver in them, they're likely supervised at a ratio with more humans than it takes to operate a long freight train.
Trains have been with us for over a century and aren't going to suddenly change on their own to solve all transport problems. Self driving tech may help make them work better by handling the station to end location bit cheaper or more efficiently than human workers.
Wouldn’t it be great to enable electric cars to go long distances with platoons? Like a bus system for electric cars to go between cities and charge while you drive. The ‘bus’ is basically a big efficient generator that can charge up the cars behind it. A lot like mid flight refueling for fighter jets.
Generator powered by what? If its a diesel powered generator, that's even less efficient and more polluting than just using diesel trucks in the first place.
Sounds like something that would require a lot of infrastructure that wouldn't make a lot of sense to build in the most rural areas of a country, unlike roads which can be quite cost-effective even without towns nearby.
That is a trade off as if you need something you either need to depend on it, or write something to do it yourself. One way you have a dependency, the other way a lot more code to maintain.
I go back and forth on what is best. I constantly hit issues that make me regret which ever choice I made for that one thing.
Aaaayyyy yooo, i wrote this a long time ago, but I think it holds up!
TLDR: there is a trade off in how much expressive power you can surface to front-end developers when their logic is written in-browser because anything you give to them, you give to anyone who can open up a console. That makes things a lot more dangerous and is in contrast w/ the back end, where you can give developers access to a full SQL implementation.
At the end of the day, it's still only shuffling around where you define your constraints, because you need them either way. Whether you define a rigid API endpoint for the frontend (named the problem in the article) and handle access control there, or make the API fluid with e.g. GraphQL (the first solution in the article) and define access controls there, it's still the same problem.
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