I will never understand the obsession with fixed-rail transit on this site. It's interesting to observe, but it's never been satisfactorily explained. Is it just a matter of people never having been out of the Bay Area in their lives?

In an age where personal mobility is becoming more important rather than less, when costs associated with large-scale civic construction projects have skyrocketed and completion times have come to be measured in decades, and when networked fleets of self-driving cars are almost literally just around the corner, rail transit in the general case is about the dumbest thing ever. But I recognize that this is essentially a religious argument, and that you're equally certain you're right. Not much we can do but vote accordingly, I guess.

Then I know that track costs less to install and maintain than roads. If it isn't practical to run track, it isn't practical to run roads.

I don't see how that can be true in the general case. Around here, in the Seattle area, a recent 34-mile light rail installation cost about $368 million. Four-lane roads cost about $500K per mile these days, from what I can tell. (And yes, that seems unrealistically low by an order of magnitude -- I think the sources I Googled up are referring only to initial costs, or costs associated with building rural Interstates.)

Our next big rail project, ST3, will install 62 miles of rail over 20+ years at a cost of over $50 billion.

Rail serves a tiny contingent of the population at enormous expense, effectively rooting them to the spot in the process. It has never really been shown to be effective at removing cars from the roads, certainly not in proportion to its price.

There has to be a better way. There may not be, right now, but there darned sure will be by the time the megaprojects we're considering today are complete and ready for service.

Good basis for comparison. Because you see, for a typical freeway, a billion per mile is the cost.

And that's just installation.

Add in the cost to maintain the roads, and they lose to tracks hands down. Tracks don't need to be resurfaced. And track beds don't need a resurfacing just to get inspected.

(You're also missing the added cost for the overhead wiring if you're going to compare against electrified rail.

Where do you get that? Obviously we got more than 500 miles of freeway for the $500B (inflation-adjusted) that the Eisenhower Interstate System cost us. We got about 50,000 miles, which works out to $10M/mile.

So something seems to have made both highway and rail construction cost ludicrous amounts of money, if you're right about the $1B/mile figure. I don't think you are, though -- that amount is what I've heard cited for the most expensive mile of highway in the country, which supposedly is the stretch of I-90 that crosses Mercer Island. I'd have to throw a [Citation Needed] flag on the billion-dollar-per-mile figure, in the general case. If we're really spending that much on roads these days, somebody needs to figure out where all that money is going.