There's a first for everything

I think this is the first time that I have fundamentally disagreed with a Freakonomics post. In We once had self-driving cars, Sanjoy Mahajan wrote:

"Compared to air or car travel, a decent train network is cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and quicker. As an example, I’ll compare two door-to-door, city-center-to-city-center journeys."

And,

"Forget self-driving cars! If we can print trillions of dollars to create moral hazard by bailing out the gamblers who nose-dived the world economy, why not print money to extend and upgrade the rail network? The U.S. and U.K. rail networks were once twice as extensive as they are today."

These statements are surprising considering this previous post:

"At any given time, the average auto has somewhere around 1.6 passengers, and the average (typically 40-seat) bus has only about 10. Rail vehicles typically have more passengers (on average about 25), but then again they are also typically much larger. Thus their average load factor (percentage of seats filled) is also not high, at about 46 percent for heavy rail systems (think subways in major cities) and about 24 percent for light rail (think systems that mostly run at street level)..." Can Mass Transit Save the Environment?

And I fine these additional arguments far more compelling:

"It's no coincidence that the only place we have anything that could even be arguably dubbed HSR is the one area where four cities are pretty tightly clustered together. And that doesn't go very fast because it uses existing rights of way, and because the politicians that fund it like to have it make stops in their city...Moreover, the Chinese government does not have to worry unduly about things like environmental impact and acquiring the right of way. For truly high speed rail, you need a long straightaway with few curves or inclines. That means it's very important to lay the rail in the best possible path, or near it. Trying to do this between, say, New York and Chicago would mean approximately a century of court battles with homeowners, environmental groups, local NIMBYs, and sundry others. Moreover, many desirable routes are occupied by our enormous network of highways, and only someone with a very rich fantasy life could believe that we are going to rip out the highways to put in a rail network." Why the U.S. Will Not Get China's High Speed Rail 

"At best, high-speed rail makes sense for very specific corridors, and these corridors will be regional, not national...Forecasts for California, which on the surface would seem like a good candidate, are rife with dubious assumptions and rosy scenarios to make the numbers work...In the end, the initiative will likely fail on its own lack of merits." Infeasible and Not Cost Effective 

And finally, this is why I believe robot-cars are still a better idea:

"The big opportunity of robocars isn't the cars themselves; it's how they could create a far more efficient transportation system." Driverless Cars Would Reshape Automobiles *and* the Transit System