Your last comment is not actually a retort, but I'll play along for now...
Some hard numbers. We can talk about "millions" of dollars in train costs as if that's some bad thing, actually some back of the envelope math reveals this is a pittance.
Average cost of a vehicle (generous) 30000 (actually much higher after repairs, maintenance), lets say 35000, our drivers all experience great luck and need very few repairs over the life of their vehicles.
Average number of vehicles, per person, lets say, 5. So about 17500$. Lets maybe round that up for easy math, the consumer needs to also pay for insurance (150 USD a month for 12 months and about 40 years of driver time, another 72000 USD).
Already, 5 consumers then cost about 1 million in car costs.
Average lifetime of a train, 40 years. Average cost of a (traditional) train track about 1 million per mile. So the number here is already pretty low per mile (of track, we are assuming for simplicity the mile of track is paid for for 40 years - actual life time is usually 50-60 years, so we are about safe here).
Lets say we cost fit, lets say, 20 villages along a route. Each one causes average 2 miles of track divergence (about 2 million cost per village), and because of politics/regulation, each 40k$ plot of land is closer to 100k$. Roughly 42$ million cost of fitting the track along these routes between two cities.
Using our numbers from earlier, we need about 5*42 or ~210 customers over 40 years to just break even with the automobile cost(s). If we assume we just want to break even, no profit, over those 40 years, that's about 5k$ per consumer per year, or assuming weekly trips, about 96$ per trip.
For 20 villages at ~1k population, I'm gonna bet a lot more than 210 consumers are going to want to use these tracks.
Lets assume best case, all 20 villages of 1k average populations are utilizing these trains now, we have 20000k users now, or 95x times the room for growth. That 96$ ticket? It can be a dollar and still break even.
Charge 10$ and you've covered the cost. And we haven't even gotten into amortizing the costs due to regular city traffic, or talked about real cost of ownership, energy inefficiencies, maintenance costs (hint, much much lower).
The benefits are absurdly high, even after a quick back-of-the-envelope run of the numbers. You have to have some absurdly high costs or do something really dumb, like install T junctions that lead to nowhere, for a rail system to become unfeasible.