Infrastructure in the U.S. is broken in terms of how it is supposed to be delivered these days. The unfortunate side effect of the freeway revolts of the 1960s putting a nail in grade separated vehicular right of ways in urban areas is that these same legal arguments and protections are now leveled against grade separated transit ways in urban areas by moneyed groups that argue in bad faith. Transit agencies now spend time planning and developing alternative options that are suboptimal, knowing full well 5/6 of these will be wasted efforts and only one will be chosen, just to give these busybodies some semblance of control of large scale engineering projects they aren't qualified to understand.

You should read up all of the drama surrounding the purple line and the eventual sepulveda transit line in la. The issue: subway tunnel boring under a rich neighborhood. Fireworks ensue along with broken understandings of physics and geology but in the end, people used nonscientific arguments to delay the purple line extension in LA for 20 years (1), and are trying to use these arguments to kill a subway line (2) that would bore under a mountain and in no way shape or form affect the complaining rich Bel Air community above it. Somehow you don't hear a peep from the people in the hollywood hills living above the redline subway tunnel, nor see any affect on their property values from having a train move several hundred feet below the parcel offered for sale. Everything takes more money and a lot more time than it should to do anything at all, compared in years previous when people would generally see infrastructure and progress as a good thing.

1. https://www.lamag.com/driver/beverly-hills-finally-loses-cra... 2. https://www.curbed.com/2022/02/bel-air-subway-tunnel-los-ang...