A single year of federal road funding is more than amtrak has gotten in its entire existance

Whenever oil producers and auto manufacturers can’t pay off politicians anymore

But more seriously, more money goes into road maintenance than rail maintenance even in the EU, which has way more rail than the US. And while I’m a big fan of trains for transportation, cars still make a lot of sense for a lot of people across the US. Trains are great for connecting population dense areas to each other. The US has a heck of a lot of “middle of nowhere”, that’s way too far from urban areas for it to be reasonable to build rail to, to be reasonable to ride a bike to the nearest town that has a station, or even have a bus route that would be going by.

In my dream world we would convert pretty much all the 4-lane roads in the US into 2 lanes of car traffic on the inside, with narrower lanes on the outside for bikes and scooters and whatever other small slow things on wheels, and light rail either on one side or what is now the median. I figure if it’s worth having 4 lanes, it’s probably worth having light rail.

I could see a scenario where if we get to a point where a super majority of vehicles on the roadways are electric then the fuel tax is shifted over to a tax on electricity which does address some of the usage issues with a registration based tax. It also helps with location of usage a little more too since just because the vehicle was registered in one state doesn't mean it was used the most in that state.

I'm well aware we have the technology to determine exactly where and how much every vehicle is being used, but I'm not terribly interested in giving many, if any, of the current governments of the world that ability.