I agree that that's probably a good way to mitigate the problem, but the U.S. already does transport a surprisingly large amount of freight by rail, with relatively little fanfare. It's a lot more than Europe, for example, which has much more high-profile passenger trains, but much lower use of freight rail. The last time I looked up statistics, it was about 35% of American freight going by rail, versus about 10% of EU-nation freight. Obviously 35% could go up, but it's not too bad. It just feels like we have fewer trains than we do, because as a human wanting to get places you can't easily take them.
A bigger problem might be the geographic distribution of truck vs. rail traffic. Rail traffic dominates in the transcontinental trips, because it's a lot cheaper to ship bulk cargo or shipping containers by rail from LA to Chicago, than by truck. But open-road inter-city trucking from LA to Chicago is relatively safe. Where trucks are most dangerous is within-urban-area transit, in congested metropolitan areas, but those are also the hardest to replace. For example, Safeway alone sends thousands of trucks out daily to supply its grocery stores; much of the produce is moved from ships to a local staging area by rail, but the last 10 miles to the actual store goes by truck. It'll be very difficult to replace that, unless we return to the days of a dense rail network where businesses had their own local rail sidings for deliveries.
Well, Rail is efficient in that it ships huge quantities...fifty, or a hundred standardized containers. Trucks do a bit less than one of those, and so are -amazing- if you only have to ship that much between points C and W (point A being a manufacturer in Asia, b being a port, and C being a major freight station)
Rail is a great solution for a specific portion of that network, but it becomes very, very inefficient if you're only moving one box of goods to a town, and in a nation this size, with as dispersed a population as ours, you simply cannot manage the outlay of hundreds of thousands of railway spikes...and taken to the smaller position, you'd still need trucks unless the railways went to each and every department store.
Maybe there will be a followup on the driver-hate generated by lengthy RR crossing waits and some stories about folks dying while trying to beat a train to the crossing.
