Take a train from Tokyo to San Francisco... I think this project is inevitable. Not in my lifetime, but maybe someone's born before I die. It's a potentially 0kg C02 journey if built right and business class accommodations would probably be 1/10th the price of a plane trip and a heck of a lot faster than a boat.
The freight potential alone...
Let's do lowest possible speed and highest possible cost of an automobile road and we get something like 0.25 mph traffic with mangled bodies in crashed vehicles everywhere and tollbooths every 5 miles where everyone is forced to drive million dollar Bugattis.
Really, this is like someone in the 1970s claiming smart phones are impossible because you can't fit a rotary dial, satellite link, tape storage reel and a CRT in your pocket.
In it, customs officers went through the train like a ticket checker to check your passport as the train travels near jet speeds through the Russian forests.
That wasn't the plot of course, but it's part of the setting. The characters desperately cling to 19th century ideas of nationalism like small European countries still have a king even in a time where vast oceans no longer matter. There's a cadence problem with the emotional salience of our institutions and their relevance. This includes the personal.
All things start and end as ceremony and theater but somewhere in the middle, they become real.