> why is rail treated so differently?

Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.

Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.

On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.

There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.

These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.

And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.

> It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation.

Because you need roads to e.g., get produce from a farm to the grocery store. You can’t have a functioning society that doesn’t involve roadways for moving people and goods the “last mile.”

> why is rail treated so differently?

roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.

you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.

Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.

This looks like a strawman. Nobody advocates for replacing roads with rail, it's about complementing.

> Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers

Yes, so the idea is to build rail for those use cases (which is somewhat the case in Europe, but not in US).

In the US, we see many places where rail has been abandoned. In the place I live (upstate NY, Finger Lakes) there are multiple walking trails that were previously locations of rail lines, which shut down more than half a century ago. The rails themselves are long gone. In some places you can see where earth was moved and concrete structures were installed to allow drainage. Maintaining these lines made no sense with the existence of a road network carrying motor vehicles. There are also abandoned canals from an even earlier time.

Yes, US had a more built-up rail system in the past. But it's naive to think it died because of fair economic competition.

People certainly didn't complain about having paved roads, or being able to buy their own automobiles. I understand it's frustrating when the public goes charging off in a direction you don't want them to.

Another bad-faith argument. A built-up railway network is not incompatible with a built-up road network. Many countries have both working together (each serving use cases with their own strengths).

They are economically incompatible. Local rail links declined because the customers who would use them used road vehicles instead.

It’s not different. The same word applies to both.