Where can I buy these roads that don't require maintenance ? Cars that never break down ? Road traffic signals that never fail ? For the first I'm asking for a friend as the road outside her front door is currently torn open for a whole month and it sure seems like "Just magically never do that" would have been a better option if you insist it's so easy.
The lines near me have freight on them (I live in a port city, a noticeable fraction of the country's imports and exports go via intermodal containers on trains) and still run like two services to London and two to other big cities per hour. The freight has to fit in between passenger services, that's a policy decision and the US just picked wrong.
One thing I try to do is read stuff from people whose job it is to do stuff. What I read from transportation people is that for dense urban areas cars are inefficient at loading and unloading. And self driving cars are the worst.
My rando observation is the few times something has gone really wrong on BART traffic is bad enough that it'd be better to take the day off. Ditto if a truck overturns on one of the bridges. And the latter happens way more often than the former. Reminds me after the Loma Prieta earthquake the bay bridge was out for a month but BART was running 12 hours later.
By “transportation people” do you mean rail fans or avid cyclists? It’s an easy mistake to make - civil engineers with a more favorable attitude to cars (or even to rail) are more likely to be employed and therefore relatively quiet than rail fans or cyclists, who spend their time doing advocacy.
Roads can tolerate a lot of damage and be repaired whilst still in use (at less capacity). Capacity might fall but repairs are signalled in advance and people can plan around them, traffic will flow anyway.
In places with big rail networks you're going to hear "I didn't make it into work this morning because of signal failures" really often. And when railways are repaired they will be totally closed for months. They're just way more brittle and unable to degrade gracefully.
The lines near me have freight on them (I live in a port city, a noticeable fraction of the country's imports and exports go via intermodal containers on trains) and still run like two services to London and two to other big cities per hour. The freight has to fit in between passenger services, that's a policy decision and the US just picked wrong.