>>1576326You're a fucking retard but I'll humor you so he doesn't have to.
>>neither of which belong in cities>Why?Freeways do not belong in cities because they clog surface streets. Surface streets cannot handle the volume, so it then spills out onto the freeway, congesting both through traffic and O&D traffic.
Semi trucks do not belong in cities because they utterly destroy the roads. A single fully loaded (80k lbs) semi driving over a stretch of road is the equivalent of 9600 cars driving that same stretch in terms of wear on the road. This figure comes from the US Government Accountability Office. P.23-26 of this study
http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdfSemi trucks are also fucking massive and have gotten larger in the decades since the linked study, so bridges and roads they use require more maintenance and have lower service lives, in addition to requiring a shitload of extra space in an area that MUST be space efficient. Their presence in urban areas drives costs up enormously for the wider roads, deeper roadbeds, stronger bridges, and greater turning areas that they require. There are smaller trucks that can be used,
>So you don't want big trucks in cities, you don't want them on highways apparently... where are they permissible?I'd love nothing more than for semi trucks to lose market share to rail, air, and sea. That being said, interstates are the only roads in the country that generally are built to deal with regular semi truck traffic. I would love for there to be less of them, because they still wear out the roads alarmingly fast, are incredibly dangerous for regular cars and trucks, and cause congestion every time one tries to pass another, but relegating them to interstates and a handful of purpose-built secondary roads to distribution centers where smaller trucks can actually do final mile deliveries would be a good start.
