I remember a hitchhiking ride in France with a man working in the building and infrastructure industry telling me about these figures, and the intense lobbying against transporting goods on rails...
The subway has tires for technical reasons. Stations in the Paris subway are close enough that better acceleration times have a significant impact on travel time and peak-hour capacity.
If they were willing to retool, you’d think they’d just go with a maglev monorail design. Those have the capacity for the instantaneous acceleration of a railgun.
That would be a pretty rough ride. I wouldn't want to be a straphanger on one of those. The turns would be uncomfortable as well in a railgun railway car.
At Michelin, we're more than just Green guides, we put our tires on the subway cars and encourage protesters to use ours for all their tire fire needs.
In January there was this report: Microscopic pieces of plastic have been discovered in the most remote locations, from the depths of the ocean to Arctic ice. Another place that plastic is appearing is inside our bodies. We’re breathing microplastic, eating it and drinking plastic-infused water every day.Plastic does not biodegrade. Instead, it breaks down into smaller pieces, and ultimately ends up everywhere, including in the food chain. Pieces that are less than five millimeters in length, around the size of a sesame seed, are called “microplastics.” https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B4TF2MQ...
On Germany the best lobby work to put transportation on truck instead of rail is done by DB, German Railroads, with their freight services. Compared to trucking you can easily double lead times, increase costs per ton and decrease trackability and reliability.
Lower costs for the customers and higher reliability when you ship by truck means rail is not really a consideration even though it would be better for everyone if it actually worked.
