The intentions of the US transportation blueprint to get people out of cars and airplanes are good, as is the hope to shift freight off the road. But it's not likely to succeed
with built-in or container batteries, and as a result that mode will see lower costs for fuel and maintenance, and it will still be competing with road freight which gets the same advantages.
It does mean that the US will end up burning a lot more biodiesel than it needs to, which is a problem as that form of energy is best reserved for longer haul aviation and shipping. And it will burn a lot more of that biodiesel near to people where the air pollution will have close to the same negative effects as burning fossil fuels.
America has deep trouble building big linear assets that aren’t roads or pipelines in this century, as the great book, about Michael Skelley’s inability to get HVDC built across state lines while gas pipelines are trivial to get approved, makes clear. The country has managed to get 49 miles of passenger rail to middling high speeds, which is to say about a quarter of what the small country of Morocco has running at higher speeds, and about one-500th of China’s also higher-speed network.
Without high-speed intercity rail, getting people out of their cars and airplane seats and into comfy, ground level trains won’t happen. The Chinese example of building 25,000 miles of high-speed, grid-tied rail linking all of its cities in a dense network for low-carbon, inexpensive, convenient transportation won’t be occurring in the US. Thankfully aviation and cars will decarbonize, although the US strategy is iffy again.
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