> If anything driverless helps dramatically on this front. If you can run trucks 24/7 without stopping then you can cut their speed say 33% or whatever and still come out on top.
I think that this line of reasoning misses the forest for the trees. If the promise of a silver bullet is a mode of transportation that can safely and reliably work 24/7 day and night with limited to no human interaction and be able to move large volumes of goods, then we already have that: it's called railway.
> The problem with rail is that most businesses don't want a whole train worth, and removing just a single car from the train is hard.
You don't need to remove cars from trains. The transportation world has been moving around shipping containers for almost a century. Shipping containers, also known as intermodal containers, were designed specifically to simplify the task of moving arbitrary units of cargo between modes of transportation, which includes to/from trains. You just need to drop them off on a flat car, take them from A to B, and then drop them off to handle the last mile.
Why don't containers already solve that problem? You can unload individual containers just fine, even put them on a truck for last-mile delivery. And then there's this American idea of putting entire trailers on flatbed cars, so you can just roll them on and off.
I think that this line of reasoning misses the forest for the trees. If the promise of a silver bullet is a mode of transportation that can safely and reliably work 24/7 day and night with limited to no human interaction and be able to move large volumes of goods, then we already have that: it's called railway.