Because trains aren’t economically viable for the vast majority of the US, and where they are economically they are the topic of conversation.

As far as why the conversation would center around the US, that’s just the regular American-centric tilt english conversations generally lean towards. Most of Europe has their shit together in some topics like this (public transportation, for instance) and the US is a huge consumer of automobiles and no one if building mass transit between the middle of nowhere to the other middle of nowhere where we could ‘efficiently’ move individually insignificant numbers of people at a time.

Been seeing a big push for trains in Florida and California lately, hopefully things with Amtrak go well and we see more lines implemented in the future

cars don't need to be driverless to be electric. i'm in favor of public transport but as long as we're in the long process of building it out it's still a lot better to have electric cars than gas guzzlers, with drivers still included.

there is a doctrine here where you fuck up a less optimal but easier solution just to force the world to adopt the better one but it's a shitty thing to do. public transport and electric vehicles aren't exclusive. in fact, for lower density stuff we will need buses and those should be electrified too.

In cities, yeah. Outside cities, impossible

But I'd love to rent autonomous electric cars to move

It’s not remotely easier. Trains carriages are easy to build, but the infrastructure is not. You have to move and extend roads, demolish buildings, lay the rails, build bridges, if you go underground there will be lots of digging and engineering work to protect nearby buildings, and don’t forget about maintenance. It is only profitable when the population is high enough and people have the need to travel to set places en mass. Otherwise it is just fantasy. If you live your whole live around any city Center, I can understand that you are not going to drive . But plenty of people lived in a tiny town of population under 10000people .

Because as the wiseman said, somebody just wants to sell more cars.

We 100% need more trains. But in rural America, we need cars to do anything.

Because many of us live in places where you must use a car, there are no alternatives

In such places electric public transport is nothing but a pipe dream

Why is it that trains are always proposed as the alternative to cars? I, for one, really want PRT to succeed. It seems to be the best middle ground between efficiency and convinience.

Trains are electric. They use diesel generators to power the wheels.