1y ago

We don't need trucks or diesel to move freight in cities, just cargo trams

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_Northern_Railway

The Sacramento Northern Railway (reporting mark SN) was a 183-mile (295 km) electric interurban railway that connected Chico in northern California with Oakland via the California capital, Sacramento. In its operation it ran directly on the streets of Oakland, Sacramento, Yuba City, Chico, and Woodland and ran interurban passenger service until 1941 and freight service into the 1960s.

6 comments

Granted, the one above is ugly, but there are/were others:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarGoTram
- Grassy tram tracks are always so beautiful. I'm so jealous of places with them
  
  Me, too. I really wish cities had streets where no cars were allows, and where you had wide pedestrian paths, nice bike paths, and grassy tram tracks. Preferably with mature shade trees forming a canopy over the whole space.
I sadly don't see how that could really work in a modern city because cargo trams can't just stand still on the track in order to unload because passenger trams can't go past them.
You'd have to build out additional rails for cargo stops everywhere.
Commonly used delivery vehicles (sprinters etc.) are quite dense w.r.t. cargo/m^2; they don't have the incredible density inefficiency problem of personal motor vehicles. They can also flexibly be temporarily parked on nearly every street in a way that at worst usually only partially blocks traffic and therefore don't really require special infrastructure.
Cargo trams would likely take more space for ...what upsides exactly? No seriously, what are the upsides?
For long distance cargo, trains' efficiency boons are obvious; long loading/unloading times are offset by the immense efficiency and speed.
For urban cargo transport with its short distances, non-standard routes and sometimes very frequent stops, I fail to see how trams would be a good fit.
- One big upside is road wear and tear. Damage to roads from vehicle weight is proportional to the axle weight raised to the fourth power, meaning heavy vehicles like trucks do the vaaaaast majority of road wear. Steel tracks can carry much heavier loads.
  Another is train boxcars can be unloaded from the side, in parallel, unlike trucks that need to be unloaded from a small opening in the back.
  Another is it's easier to electrify, and you don't need rubber tires, so you avoid a lot of emissions (CO2 from fossil fuels and particulate matter from tires).
  Finally, you need an asphalt road to support trucks. With cargo trams, you can have non-impervious surfaces like grass that no other cars can drive on, meaning you don't accidentally induce demand for passenger cars when building infrastructure for commercial trucks.
  And yeah, a big downside of course is needing way more tramways, but I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing to have. Just makes the switchover longer and costlier.
  That said, I think trams make most sense for bigger stores, e.g., grocery stores. For regular Amazon deliveries? Not so much. For those, neighborhood electric vehicles (basically glorified golf carts) are probably more suitable. Most delivery vans run well below cargo capacity most of the time anyways, meaning they don't really benefit that much from the capacity of a larger vehicle.

6 comments