There's at least two caveats to those completely reasonable points: freight also is terrible, and cities build around trains. I won't touch the freight one, oth

There's at least two caveats to those completely reasonable points: freight also is terrible, and cities build around trains. I won't touch the freight one, other than it seems to be abysmally unreliable compared to a semi. But a high speed thoroughfare is great now, but soon someone's going to cheat and try to lay road across one of those tracks. The high speed lines really need to be separated with no outside interference. I had a weird feeling a maybe ten years ago talking with a friend who is a surveyor. He noted that rail lines often take precedence in disputes, since they almost always predate any other landmarks, including roads. And over the intervening years, in the manufacturing towns I've been in it looks like we put all those rails in the most inconvenient places... Unless we actually just did the opposite and plopped our towns next to all the rail lines. And considering how vital rail was before the highways and cheap fuel, I think that's just what happened. Anyhow, just my two cents on it. I think we sorta painted ourselves into a corner with this whole mess. It's certainly a political problem, but the solution really would involve positively stupefying amounts of capital, either to make bypass rail or to make those silly roads all overpasses. I say it's worth it, but, well, I'm biased.