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The craze for self-driving cars, especially if the current machine trend is anything to go by. Two issues with it I can't help but understand is that driving needs a human factor and that if the freedom of being in the driver seat wasn't an issue, we'd be significantly closer to desiring a system of long distance personal rails instead of cars. I'm all for metasystemic road reform.
Building that amount of steel infrastructure really isn't as easy as you trainbrain idealists seem to think, we really shouldn't destroy the planets climate just to make a huge grid of expensive to maintain tracks when there are far better options - such as fleet managed self driving cars.
If course trains are great for medium length journeys on high volume routes, commuting for example but they're not a one size fits all solution
Both options are pretty destructive to the environment (though I was thinking more monorail-esque than trains), but roads and cars I would think do more negatives, from the road construction to the CO2 to the car accidents. And it might not even be rails that are the best option, I just know our traffic system is horrendous.
We need mixed mode integrated transport networks, trains and trams are great in many situations but they're not ideal everywhere. Current car culture is pretty terrible but self driving electric cars have huge efficiency advantages over other means of transport especially when fleet managed.
I've spent a lot of my life trying to rely on buses and they have a lot of downsides, one thing interesting is the bus Island and bus desert effect - buses end up pointing to corporate shopping areas where retail rents go up because there's more foot traffic, nice little independent shops get priced out and relocate to areas where no one can go because there's no buses... of course you'll say just have more buses but the logistics get really messy, you need everyone to be going to the same places or you're running empty buses. Trains are even harder to determine routes for because you either need it to be able to handle 100% of use cases or to also have a road network.
We absolutely need more rapid mass transit like trains, self drive fleet managed electric cars could make that possible even in rural areas