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Even if you rarely use the highways, you still depend upon them.

Not as much as you are trying to make out. Let's see.

Last time you bought something at the grocery store

More and more meats and perishables are now shipped again across country via rail in intermodal trucks and refrgierator cars. Local distribution on both ends is the domain of the truck. Companies that make cookies, flour, sugar, crackers, snack foods and the like also ship their raw materials to bakeries, mills, and refineries and frequently ship finished goods out by rail too. Its quite rare for a bulk commodity like flour or sugar to be driven very far.

or filled your tank up with gas

Gas is shipped by ship and pipeline around here except for local distirbution. The ethanol being added to it is shipped by rail directly from the plant to the tank farm.

how do you suppose those items showed up in those places in an efficient manner?

Well, as I showed, frequently by rail, with only final distribution by truck.

That accountant

Don't us an accountant.

barber

My barber lives in the neighborhood. He walks to work from his house nearby. I walk to the barbershop.

financial planner

Don't need a financial planner. I can handle that myself with my wife's help (she was a financial planner, now retired to be a mom).

repairman

I'm the repairman around here.

etc that you use, how do you suppose they were able to get to work or show up at your home on a service call?

The one guy I did use walked on a sidewalk paid for with his property tax money.

How did they get the equipment and tools that they use?

Do you ever mail a letter or a package? How do you think it arrives at the final destination, sometimes clear across the country, for as little as $0.37. You depend on those highways whether you use them or not.

Letters I mail go by air if they are going cross country. Packages are mostly on the railroads in intermodal trucks or boxcars. The USPS mostly does not use over the road trucking except for short distances and of course, local delivery.

Oh, and I walk to the post office to mail my letters. Its on my way to work between my office and the train station.

Think again. How the heck do you think all of that "local delivery" occurs all over the country? Do you think they have rail lines going to distribution centers that serve only that neighborhood for each of those items? Sheesh.

Just for the USPS alone, I know for a fact that there is ONE distribution center here on the north edge of town, and from there they have to distribute to more than a hundred post offices that serve around 5 million people. And that is just here, in one city. Guess what, they don't move the mail from the distribution center to the individual post offices by rail. They do it mostly on interstate highways. I see their trucks all the time. When I track a UPS ground package, it does move via ground. Even an express package goes to a distribution center about 475 miles from here (Sweetwater, TX), then it is driven to a distribution center about 5 miles away (Stafford), then it is driven here -- and in each of those steps except for the last it goes via interstate highway.

Very few businesses have rail sidings. I have never seen a bakery with one like you mention. I just happen to live in a town named Sugar Land, aptly named because of the plant here that once made sugar. Now ithe company only operates a distribution center here, and it services most of the deep south. There are trucks coming out of that place night and day, and I know it isn't going only to my local Kroger. It services much of the southern US.

Your town must be heavily industrialized with tank farms everywhere. Here, our gasoline terminals are about 50 miles away, on the other side of Houston, and trucks are contstantly in there filling up to serving thousand and thousands of gas stations not only all the way on my side of town but also the far reaches of the state where there are no tank farms.

I worked for twenty years in the chemical industry, and for much of it I was involved in supply chain issues. There's an industry that you rely upon heavily, whether you know it or not. If you want to export something, of course it goes by tanker -- after it is moved by truck a couple of times before it hits the ship's rail. And with some commodities, pipelines are great, but there are very few products that are well suited to pipelines. But only the largest customers -- like P&G, etc, can take rail cars of 20,000 gallons per shipment. Most everyone else gets their goods via truck, 5000 gallons or so at a pop. Want 80 drums to ship from an east Texas chemical plant to Seattle? It is sent by truck, all the way. Send it by rail, it could take more than a week longer to get there. A huge volume of petrochemicals is moved long distances all over the country by truck as the only means of transport.

The BEST distributor in any US business BY FAR is Walmart. Other retail businesses have tried to hire their employees to find out their secrets. And they move everything around (once it gets here from China '-) ) by TRUCK. Those damn things are all over the highways.

We all depend on goods and services that depend on effecient distribution and highways are a crucial part of that. No matter what you say, I know you are no different than anyone else in this regard. Your own supply chain in your little world might be simple, but there is a big infrastructure behind it that makes that possible, and it depends heavily on our highways.

It's pretty apparent that you don't drive, or get on an interstate or the PA turnpike.

At last count, here on I-10 (east west from Fla to Calif) here in Texas, every 3rd vehicle was an 18 wheeler truck.

Our warehouses are now the interstate highways, and everything is now 'just in time' delivery. Rail has a lower percentage of total shipments every year, except for massive quantities (eg coal and grain).

'Just in time' material control systems have pretty much sunk rail transit for anything other than large quantities and hazardous chemicals in large quantities.