> If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
It depends on (a) why and (b) second-order effects.
Are they doing it, e.g, because they want to build a new campus in a lower-cost-of-living area, and they want to make the idea of living in Tuscaloosa, AL more palatable by having it connected to Atlanta, GA with train service that does not take 6(!!!!) hours as Amtrak currently does? Amazing, go Google!
Oh, they want to make it so that everyone can use it at reasonable prices, but Google employees can do it for free and get priority boarding? Fine, if that's what it takes to get private enterprises investing in infrastructure, I'm okay with it.
Oh, they want to do it because they are going to use it as a test-bed for some revolutionary transportation technology that they pinky-promise will eventually work as some Futurama-style tube network where anyone can go door-to-door as fast as possible? And they are offering the whole thing for free (or heavily subsidized) for everyone that enrolls in their beta program? Then please Google go fuck itself, because we all know how this is just bait.
I despise this way of arguing. Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever. Such a crude metric is entirely insufficient to back up an argument about how great American railways supposedly are.
What's the ticket cost for the passengers compared to other countries? Average train delay? Cancellation rate? Speed? Death rate? The argument is not looking so hot anymore, right? Then stop it with the irrelevant statistics of rail track length.
First by track and third by tonnage (after China and Russia).
It actually is. Japan's new maglev shinkansen line is stalling because they can't get land rights to lay rail through.[1]
An even more blasphemous example is California's high speed rail project which never accomplishes anything, but I'm pretty sure that also suffers from a severe case of legalized money laundering.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen#Shiz...
You seem to just not like that this is done by Google. (Or by any private entity.) That is fine. I, like, hate this one restaurant in New York. But be honest about your motivations and check your biases.
This isn’t self-driving cars vs public transit debate because there isn’t one. If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
> world's largest freight rail system
The world’s largest rail system, period. We have to qualify that other countries have the largest passenger rail systems.