Mildly Infuriating

The same holds true for roads as well: Build a massive highway somewhere in the mountains where nobody lives and it will cost a ton of money while having very little benefit. And highway bridges and tunnels are also very expensive to build.

For comparison, I pulled some numbers from Germany. High speed train tracks cost €25mio/km (not counting bridges or tunnels). Highways cost €20mio/km (again not counting bridges or tunnels). So it's not that far off.

On the other hand, maintaining a high speed track is much cheaper, at around €70k/km pa., while maintaining a highway costs €390k/km pa plus another €180k/km pa. administrative cost.

But the real kicker is capacity: A 2-lane highway has a capacity of 3000-5000 vehicles per hour. At an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car, that's 3600-6000 people.

An Austrian Railjet for example, can carry around 1700 people and you can run them at 3-minute intervals on a high speed track. That's a total capacity of 34 000 people per hour. They are usually not run at that frequency, because that's vastly more than what's ever necessary, but you get the point. High speed rail has such a massive capacity, that it's virtually unlimited, for a price that's very comparable to a regular 2-lane highway.

When it comes to cargo, low-speed rail is even much more efficient than trucks on roads, with the major downside being that you have to unload the cargo to trucks for local distribution.

But my main point here is that roads aren't some holy heal-it-all solution that's never a waste of money while rail needs to be profitable on its own, like a lot of people seem to perceive it. A highway is not more of a basic human need than high-speed rail.