Yet EPA officials said the rule will not mandate the adoption of a particular zero-emission technology. Rather, it will require manufacturers to reduce emissions by choosing from several cleaner technologies, including electric trucks, hybrid trucks and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

For comparison, The New York Times coverage

  • admiralteal
    link
    fedilink
    103 months ago

    Man if only we could take most of the major truck routes and turn them into low-emission, low-congestion corridors using comparably minimal labor. Hell, we could make it so they don’t need to carry any power onboard at all, whether fossil or battery, by just making it so they could be directly connected to a wire on these corridors. We could chain up dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of trucks into giant mega-trucks that only took a handful of people to operate if we really thought hard about how to do it.

    • Onihikage
      link
      fedilink
      English
      33 months ago

      Trucks and trains serve different purposes. If you want to get a mountain of stuff from the shipyard to distribution centers, trains are a great way to do that. If you want to get stuff from the distribution center to individual stores within a 200-mile radius, now you’re talking trucks, and a lot of their destinations will be much closer than 200 miles, meaning even plug-in hybrid trucks would often be able to make trips without using any fuel.

      • admiralteal
        link
        fedilink
        43 months ago

        Agreed, trucks and trains serve different purposes.

        And in the US, most of those train purposes are served by trucks.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      23 months ago

      It’s almost like we already do that but the last miles must be done by trucks because not everywhere is suitable for a train track coming right to your back door.

      If you’re gonna be snarky, at least be right.

      • admiralteal
        link
        fedilink
        5
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        Trucks move almost twice the value of freight in the US as trains. We basically only move gravel, coal, tanks full of chemicals, and other bullshit cargo that is so extraordinarily low-value that the economics of it can ONLY make sense with trains. Just compare how much cargo leaves our major ports on trucks vs on trains – this is a FIRST mile problem and yet for nearly all commercial goods, it most likely gets unloaded from a cargo ship and onto a truck to be delivered to a logistics hub where it will be broken down into more trucks.

        We don’t even attempt to move goods to the last mile by train. Major logistics hubs and mfgs are mostly not even rail-connected because they just don’t give a shit (in no small part because of how utterly incompetent our rail operators are), and how MASSIVELY subsidized trucks are by way of the incredibly cheap, huge highway network that we spend orders of magnitude more on than rail.

        You’re just making shit up based on feelings.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      23 months ago

      I mean, that sounds like it would be really hard to keep them all properly aligned - perhaps we could somehow modify the roads to keep them centered mechanically