Perhaps, but it's not as though the popularity of oil pipelines is especially high. They still get built! If anything, much of the bureaucracy and public would

Perhaps, but it's not as though the popularity of oil pipelines is especially high. They still get built! If anything, much of the bureaucracy and public would far prefer to build high speed rail in place of a pipeline. Certainly neither face a particularly positive regulatory environment. I'm not sure what your second point is getting at. Rail lines face pretty huge eminent domain burdens along with everything else. My point was mostly that the hurdles of building rail and pipelines are both quite high. The economic benefit of oil pipelines are enough to make them worth the trouble to a private firm. Rail, not so much.