Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
TacticalCoder 42 minutes ago [-]
> Trucking is already subsidized because they don't pay their fair share of costs.
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
thelastgallon 29 minutes ago [-]
> And that's an understatement
Indeed!
Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.
1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.
3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.
4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)
5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen
5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust
6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.
7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.
8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.
10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.
11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.
A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.
serioussecurity 20 minutes ago [-]
I don't think this is quite accurate.
If trucks were forced to bear their share of the burden we might see a significant shift in how we transported goods, including more rail.
(Yes, I know rail doesn't work for last mile.)
scott_w 4 minutes ago [-]
It does need to be paired with investment in train infrastructure, usually led by governments.
Obviously, that would be a very good thing, just pointing it out!
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
And?
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.
SideQuark 29 minutes ago [-]
> Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads.
If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.
It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.
anomaly_ 2 hours ago [-]
You understand that all business activity in an economy is driven by consumers. Everything is downstream of consumer demand.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Then, subsidize everything for all businesses?
Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.
ssl-3 52 minutes ago [-]
I would rather that we subsidize the consumers.
(The super rich will still be super rich.)
igor47 2 hours ago [-]
What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems)
kjshsh123 1 hours ago [-]
Consumer demand can still be distorted.
I said this in another comment:
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
igor47 2 hours ago [-]
If the costs of trucking is internalized, it then factors into the cost of goods shipped by truck. This makes it possible for competitors like rail or local produce to complete, which then allows consumers to save money. On the other hand, if the cost is externalized, we secretly pay more without even having the possibility of paying less.
andrewflnr 33 minutes ago [-]
The point of a market economy is to make prices accurately reflect costs. If moving things over the roads on trucks costs repair labor and materials, the price of things moved over the roads should reflect that. But maybe it's possible instead for those goods to be moved some other way with lower actual cost, and thus charge a lower price. But no one bothers finding that out if we just swallow the cost with a glib excuse of "well we all benefit".
Fezzik 2 hours ago [-]
The annual net profit of the trucking industry in the USA is $30-$40 billion dollars. They aren’t scraping by and could certainly pay for their proportion of the damage trucks inflict on roads.
thelastgallon 1 hours ago [-]
It is NOT the profits of trucking industry, the trucking industry will remain intact and fine. It is the profits of ALL the companies using trucking, they get to upgrade their businesses with the new model. And the innovative businesses which figure out how to do logistics better will survice.
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
jcranmer 2 hours ago [-]
The annual revenue of the trucking industry is roughly $900 billion. That puts their net profit margin at about 3-5%.
I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that.
bitmasher9 2 hours ago [-]
$30-$40 billion sounds like scrapping by to me. For an entire industry, one of the most important in the country.
kjshsh123 2 hours ago [-]
It might be more economical for cargo to be moved by other means or for many people to live closer together than they do.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
epolanski 2 hours ago [-]
Move more of it to rail.
rekttrader 2 hours ago [-]
As much of it as possible is done by rail, it’s the last mile problem.
Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff
igor47 2 hours ago [-]
Let those consumers pay for it then!
trollbridge 60 minutes ago [-]
What rail? The railroads are at capacity
ssl-3 50 minutes ago [-]
They are? Is there a chart or a map or a study or something that supports this?
behringer 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great way to end up with tolls on all the roads. Or no access to the roads at all.
thelastgallon 1 hours ago [-]
No, you should fight for free roads. How many ways do you want to subsidize the super rich? Why are you fighting for their interests?
SideQuark 25 minutes ago [-]
Fighting for free roads is a sure way to have crap or no roads to a lot of places. If you (or any consumer) gets value from there bring roads, then you should pay some for that value. It’s not subsidizing the super rich - sounds like you want others to subsidize you.
kelseyfrog 34 minutes ago [-]
Or mileage * weight^4 based fees. It would have the added benefit of reducing the amount of gender-affirming trucks on the road.
thesmtsolver2 2 hours ago [-]
So should we then makes buses also pay their fare share? I know you will then respond with second-order effects of buses and public transportation without considering that for trucks.
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
thelastgallon 17 minutes ago [-]
Buses? Where? In the US they are as rare as unicorns. It depends on location. In third world countries metros, it is best to run electric buses for free and tax cars. It will reduce traffic and avoid hundreds of billions of road expansions if everyone is driving a car.
celestialcheese 3 hours ago [-]
This is a meaningless stat without comparison. There are nearly 500k trucking companies operating in the US, with ~91% operating 10 trucks or fewer.
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
WalterBright 2 hours ago [-]
A statistic is propaganda if it is a value without a percentage, or a percentage without a value.
tptacek 18 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure there's something to this but unless I missed it this story is missing the one piece of data you really want in order to contextualize: how many trucking companies ordinarily go under any given month?
simondotau 3 hours ago [-]
I did a quick check to see how unusual this is. According to LLM-assisted research on actual U.S. trucking companies filing Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 (rather than carriers simply shutting down) the number isn't especially remarkable.
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
So 16 in 30 days is a rate that, if sustained, trends toward ~3x the high end of your estimate of normal.
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
irjustin 3 hours ago [-]
> I don't expect "trucking" to fail
Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
mingus88 2 hours ago [-]
We didn’t start a war. That is a thing that Congress has sole authority to declare, and that hasn’t happened.
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
ssl-3 40 minutes ago [-]
Congress hasn't issued a declaration of war that was signed by the president since June of 1942.
Other examples exist for things like The War in Afghanistan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and similar. But I'm not trying to write an unprompted book here on this fine October night.
(Maybe Congress didn't declare those wars, but they sure seemed to accept participation in them nonetheless.)
1over137 2 hours ago [-]
The US Congress not declaring a war is the normal thing (for the last many decades).
aorloff 2 hours ago [-]
> Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war.
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
simondotau 3 hours ago [-]
That's assuming that this article is pointing to a new trend and not merely a clustering event, where the price shock is simply bringing future failures forward in time.
servo_sausage 3 hours ago [-]
It would lead 195 per year if it stays at that trend; only 1.3x the high end of "normal".
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
serioussecurity 19 minutes ago [-]
Demand may not be elastic however.
delichon 3 hours ago [-]
The interstate pneumatic tube network I designed with macaroni in the fifth grade is looking visionary now.
ssl-3 4 minutes ago [-]
In the the Space Exploration overhaul mod I once played for Factorio, at one stage the game progressed to the point that many/most resources could be converted into matter.
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but intense amounts of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
pkulak 3 hours ago [-]
Or trains...
ssl-3 11 minutes ago [-]
We have freight trains in the US. (I hear a freight train right now as I write this.)
wizardforhire 2 hours ago [-]
Its not big truck you cant just dump something on it! Its… its a series of….oh my! LOL!!!
ectospheno 5 hours ago [-]
Aren't there several orders of magnitude more trucking companies in the US than 16?
schiffern 5 hours ago [-]
Heck, shouldn't that be below the expected bankrupt trucking companies in any given 1-2 month period?
I felt this on my last truck shipment. My previous LTL provider suddenly closed and the next cheapest option is more than twice as expensive.
cfiggers 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like your previous LTL had market headroom to be merely twice as expensive while still beating the next cheapest option. And if they'd done so who knows, they might have stayed in business.
fn-mote 4 hours ago [-]
Totally unsurprising.
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
ada1981 29 minutes ago [-]
MAGA!
_blk 3 hours ago [-]
Mind you there's a hefty tax surcharge on Diesel that could easily be lowered if the trucking economy was that important to states like California. Two years ago Diesel was at 8$ when it was 4 everywhere else, last year 9$, 5-6 in most other states. Now 10$? Haven't been there lately but it's still at 6 in MO/AR. It's not the oil price that's the problem with the Diesel price.
syngrog66 1 hours ago [-]
We've been the target of a stochastic economic sabotage campaign for years. I've been surprised the US economy has been in as good of shape as it is, considering all the obvious sabotaging events/trends.
genxy 4 hours ago [-]
Good opportunity for oligarchs like Musk to move in.
enoint 3 hours ago [-]
I’d see it if:
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
petra 2 hours ago [-]
Trucking is a low-margin, high capex business.
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, to build space based trucking. Because roads are congested, getting permits for new roads is hard.
simondotau 3 hours ago [-]
...to move in and sell innovative new products in a healthy, vibrant and mature marketplace? In direct competition with Mack, Freightliner, Kenworth and Peterbilt? Selling products which only get sold if people choose to buy them?
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
Correct, it's a good opportunity.
rasz 3 hours ago [-]
See the problem is the flawless and totally Autopilot Full Self-Driving systems somehow got excluded from the Tesla Semi for some inexplicable /cought crashes with big explosions and potential of tens of fatalities /cough reason, so cant really enter trucking market without hiring humans and admitting something is not right with a "tech company".
Foxhuls 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t want this to imply that autopilot is somehow flawless and not allowing/including it is the wrong choice. However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen so I’ve always found it shocking just how much they’re highlighted and focused on when a computer causes them. I just think these things need to be looked at from a much more statistical angle than they currently seem to be. Innovation has kind of always been dangerous and risky throughout history with unfortunate lessons learned. Mitigating them should obviously be the goal but some level of risk kind of has to be acceptable.
enoint 3 hours ago [-]
These are the people who presume all undocumented aliens are dangerous, and that voting fraud is statistically meaningful, and that sports leagues with 0 trans players are consumed by trans players’ problems. Quietly moving quickly will probably work better than a long, thoughtful campaign of Carter-esque nagging.
dzhiurgis 2 hours ago [-]
> However crashes and fatalities are something that already happen
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.
enoint 3 hours ago [-]
They could justify a human in the cab to satisfy existing reflective triangle regulations. Provides cheap publicity to nourish their lobbyists.
slopinthebag 3 hours ago [-]
people really do just say anything to hate on others eh
deepfriedchokes 3 hours ago [-]
You win, they win. You lose, they win. It’s a scam.
Roads are entirely subsidized by people. Commercial trucks should bear the fair costs to make it equitable. Businesses will have the greatest incentive to cut costs and improve logistics.
And we need to talk about the externalities and fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide (yale).
And that's an understatement: personal vehicles are so light they hardly damage the roads. This can be seen on three-lanes european highways where the leftmost lane is always totally pristine while the rightmost lane is often damaged and badly curved where trucks wheels do pass.
In the wikipedia link you gave it talks about 10 000 : 1 but for many cars and for many trucks it's more like 50 000 : 1.
Cars don't even register.
Now of course should commercial trucks bear the fair costs for being the only ones to damage the roads, everything would be pricier for merchandise price would need to be adjusted for the added logistics costs.
Indeed!
Trucking industry has many subsides, perverse incentives and (un)intended side-effects.
1) Fossil fuel subsidies, $7T/year worldwide. Poor countries subsidize a lot!
2) Biodiesel subsidies to grow crops.
3) Biodiesel subsides externalities. This directly increases cost of crops, food, livestock, as it reduces acres available to grow food.
4) Significant Health costs from pollution. (nytimes, 10M deaths/year from air pollution)
5a) Diesel fuel is less refined than gasoline, featuring longer carbon chains and higher natural levels of sulfur and nitrogen
5b) Because of how heavy they are, they are significant source of particulate matter from road dust, tire dust, brake dust
6) Real estate. Real estate is scarce and costly. Roads are 15 - 20% of a citys area. People pay for it, businesses get to use it for free.
7) They don't pay their fair share of road maintenance for the damage they cause.
8) Because of the damage they cause, roads need to be continuously maintained. Every road is always under construction, disrupting everyday life and causing congestion. If we build roads just for cars, they could go a decade or more without repaving.
9) Paving and repaving roads, building new roads is a cornucopia of money for politicians and their contracting company buddies. This is trillions of dollars worldwide.
10) Businesses running highly efficient modes of transportation can't compete.
11) With so many subsidies for the super rich, local communities which were producing the same goods locally can't compete.
A lot of people think its they sacred duty to protect the profits of a few dozen/hundred super rich and defend their right to extract subsidies/taxes from all of us. AI is probably going to destroy a lot of jobs. For the jobs that aren't destroyed (regulation requiring human in loop), the skill<->wage leverage will be destroyed, everyone is reduced to a flipping burgers at McDs kind of job. But you will be outcompeted by people who can work for cents/hour from a third world country.
If trucks were forced to bear their share of the burden we might see a significant shift in how we transported goods, including more rail.
(Yes, I know rail doesn't work for last mile.)
Obviously, that would be a very good thing, just pointing it out!
Almost everything we eat or otherwise need for a comfortable life is transported by truck at some point. We all benefit from that. So we either pay more for trucking so that they can pay more for roads, or we just pay for the roads directly.
Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.
Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.
If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.
It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.
Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.
(The super rich will still be super rich.)
I said this in another comment:
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
This also gives a fighting chance for local production. Why are we hell bent on screwing local communities and protect the subsidies to the super rich?
I suspect many commenters here work in companies that expect their profit margins to be 10× that.
Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".
Unless it’s last minute which a surprising amount of it is, but consumers love overnight access to stuff
And yeah you can have rail for every city and store in a distributed country like the US.
16 companies seems like standard churn (if not a significantly lower than what I'd expect in a low margin business like trucking).
16 trucking bankruptcies in 30 days looks elevated, but it's not unprecedented. FreightWaves counted more than 20 trucking-related Chapter 7/11 filings in another 30-day period earlier in 2026, while previous downturns have produced much larger waves of failures.
What's happening here is that a sudden cost shock (like a diesel price spike) is probably clustering failures that might otherwise have been spread over several months. So 16 filings in a month may say something about timing, but by itself doesn't seem strong evidence of an extraordinary increase in the underlying rate of trucking bankruptcies.
That isn't to say higher fuel costs are a non-event; clearly they're bad for an industry already operating on thin margins. But we'll need longer-term statistics before we can tell whether fuel prices caused a sustained, systemic increase in trucking bankruptcies.
--
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freight-market-pushes-anot... (Early 2026)
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/bulmaks-files-chapter-11-ba... (Late 2025)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/an-unusually-terrible-frei... (Mid 2023)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-trucking-bloodbath-isn... (Mid 2022)
https://www.truckingdive.com/news/trucking-fleet-bankruptcy-... (Early 2021)
https://www.propertycasualty360.com/fcs/2020/01/13/another-o... (Early 2020)
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
We've had wars since then.
edit,
Two recent examples from a long list:
The Persian Gulf War was admitted to be as such in April of 1991. https://www.congress.gov/102/statute/STATUTE-105/STATUTE-105...
The Global War on Terror was funded on that name in 2005. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/1268
Other examples exist for things like The War in Afghanistan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and similar. But I'm not trying to write an unprompted book here on this fine October night.
(Maybe Congress didn't declare those wars, but they sure seemed to accept participation in them nonetheless.)
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
This matter could be transported from A to B.
And at the destination, this matter could be converted back into resources.
Mine uranium and/or copper and turn them into generic matter? Sure, why not.
Turn that matter into iron somewhere else? Of course!
And since matter could be transported in pipelines, it was just one tube for ~everything at that point. Some processes put matter into the tube, and some other processes took matter out of that same tube.
(It was very energy-intensive to make these conversions, but intense amounts of electrical power was also a solved problem by that point in the game.)
https://www.skool.com/the-logistics-war-room-1319/trucking-b...
I expect these are small companies surviving month to month without the ability (or skill) to plan for catastrophic changes in the future (present).
- diesel prices were actually bankrupting companies. Those companies have been adjusting to daily price fluctuations, and also passing that surcharge on.
- cheaper diesel was expected to remain unattainable across the Midwest, making an E85 (or higher) fleet viable.
- can they pick up some of the fleet of closing operators without labor considerations?
There are some niches where it isn't true, when you have some other moat(like a warehouse network, or customer density in a route) so owning trucks strengthens that moat.
But in general, It's a bad business to own trucks.
...to sell products which could keep trucking affordable and potentially save some future trucking companies from bankruptcy?
...to reduce the country's exposure to global energy shocks by transitioning to a form of energy with a diverse means of production?
Correct, it's a good opportunity.
Have they? https://robotaxireport.com/data/waymo-vs-tesla-safety-record...
p.s. as for waymo vs tesla - tesla has 10x less vehicles so far and only recently significantly added to the fleet. Given the scrutiny they receive and faux pass waymo has been getting, I don't think robotaxi crash rate will outnumber waymo. but of course there are people with mental health issues that crash into them on purpose, so idk.