Yes, most people cannot think beyond first-order effects, but this can be equally applied to HS2 proponents. There are other solutions to cut the amount of cargo traffic, but most of them involve just consuming less stuff.
Building more and more infrastructure is not sustainable. It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure. The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
> because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go
I don't buy that. The potholes are in residential and country roads. No amount of railways is going to do anything about that. The cargo traffic which could go via rail is on the motorways.
I'm all for more rail and less roads. But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
Consuming less is simply not a solution that anybody would ever agree to. Anything that you cut out would just be replaced with other consumption. Maybe consumtion can be slightly more local, but the idea that most consumption can be replaced with something that is local a pipedream. And even if you did that, to produce all that stuff locally the inputs for that production would still need to be transported.
The only way to reduce consumption is people getting poorer or people increasing their savings. And that's just future consumption.
Building more and more infrastructure is actually sustainable. And arguably we are not even building more and more as things like rail infrastructure is less now then it was in many places.
> It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure.
And that is actually good if the infrastructure usage does not have massive negative externalizes, like ... trains. It actually reduces externalizes because it takes away from car and air traffic.
> The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
Switzerland is prove that you can reduce the amount of lorries. But even if you don't, it will at least reduce the growth. And it makes it so you don't have to invest in highway expansion.
You might be against that anyway, but most people would demand it if existing highways are always full of lorries.
> But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
If you tax heavy transport without providing an alternative you simply drive up cost of living and make peoples live worse.
But you are right, taxing lorries and putting that into a fund that helps rail expansion is exactly what Switzerland did.