>That's empirically not as true as it intuitively seems; induced traffic is a thing.

It's definitely empirically true. I've watched it happen for decades. There are certainly new cars on the road, but they would have been there anyway, for the most part. If you have a growing economy people immigrate in search of jobs whether the infrastructure is ready or not.

Now, I'd rather we had enough rail to handle all those people and more, but the problem with rail is before your network is built out completely it's not very useful.

>But, the HSR project is spending money on regional light rail and conventional rail between metro areas.

Great. Then all we need to cancel is the HSR itself.