The bit you've quoted from Cato is not a solid point, in my opinion. It is conflating two different things - local / commuter rail, which is in competition with

The bit you've quoted from Cato is not a solid point, in my opinion. It is conflating two different things - local / commuter rail, which is in competition with cars, and high speed rail, which is not. Clearly there has been a massive long term trend towards increasing dominance of the car over the last sixty years, but there has never been any expectation that high speed rail could reverse that trend - after all, the vast majority of journeys and of journey miles are not between cities, but everyday local transport, which has nothing to do with high speed rail. The benefits are really to do with bringing city centres closer together, to be able to get on a train in London and arrive in Paris (220 miles away, and across a sea) within two and a half hours, or in Manchester (170 miles away) within an hour - the latter is the subject of the next high speed line project in the UK. It would take four hours to drive London to Manchester, on excellent motorways, and an hour would hardly get you from the city centre to the start of Heathrow airport security. Having another city within an hour of two of hassle free travel just alters fundamentally the sense of distance between those cities. Bridge building is also often not profitable, but has a long term effect on interconnectedness and the development of the area around.