I'm not for the highways, but trains need train stations and large rail yards and big storage and maintenance areas, and whole new set of machinery and infrastructure to maintain.
Operators for trains and tracks and other systems.
Its not just "lay some track and buy a train", and you are not saying that either.
Right decision imo to aim for that in the long run tho!
Trains still need some pretty massive interchanges, just look at any megabase in Factorio. There are literally books of blueprints to deal with any interchange you could possibly need for your trains.
Rail takes up some space, but only at terminating stations. The tracks themselves for 99% of the journey are much more space efficient than roads. We can't compare factorio to real life aha, we are transporting people instead of cargo and over much larger distances.
Besides, USA has a lot of space, that wasn't really the issue, it was the spending of money on the wrong infrastructure.
In Factorio the only passenger on the trains is the player character known as "the engineer," and if your play style is anything like mine, you can run faster than your trains, so they just ship cargo.
I was being a bit facetious by bringing up Factorio, it's just my go to use case for train path designing, since Railroad Tycoon basically doesn't exist any more.
Also their point on distances stands since the largest Factorio maps would scale to be several hundred to a thousand miles across.
Trains still need some pretty massive interchanges, just look at any megabase in Factorio. There are literally books of blueprints to deal with any interchange you could possibly need for your trains.
Infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean roads. Although I haven't heard of anyone using this money to make public transportation better I have heard stories of cities using this money to improve pedestrian and bike infrastructure.