What’s this “transportation right” you speak of? The right to roam isn’t guaranteed by the constitution, but protection against unlawful seizure of private property is. We should be careful to not conflate the rights actually guaranteed to us by the law of the land with things that various individuals feel are “nice to have”. And certainly not deprioritize the former in favor of the latter.

The problem is that there are only so many viable paths between cities. Rails is worse than roads in this case because turns can't be as sharp and grades can't be as steep.

When there are potentially tens of thousands of property owners along that path, each property owner can derail the whole thing or add enormous costs, so they have an insanely strong negotiating position. If you were just to attempt to negotiate with each property owner, the cost would make building new rail in a populated area impossible.

There has never been any real length of railroad built through a populated area with many landowners without some kind of government intervention akin to eminent domain.

It's a tragedy of the commons situation - you might be able to buy 90% of the land for a "reasonable price" (which is hard to define - depending on the type of land use, the value of the owner's entire plot would change significantly by having a train going by every day, sometimes greater sometimes lesser), but if the remaining 10% don't play ball you can't have the train.

So the government is in a position of "we'll give you X for this, but if you don't agree we'll just take it from you", which is a... non-Texan position for government to be in, to say the least.

Imagine that you had to negotiate with a homeowner. You could find a price where you could buy their property.

Now imagine that you had to negotiate with 10,000 homeowners. At least one of them is going to insist that their place is worth one billion dollars and count on you caving because they can hold up the entire project.

That's why forced confiscation - because people try to hold the project hostage for ransom.

If people whose houses were taken were given an amount of money that allowed them to maintain their standard of living somewhere else, I'd have no issue with increased use of eminent domain. Too often we do see it used in the poorest neighborhoods where people are given some kind of "market price" for their home which isn't enough to buy any other home nearby.

But even without this, the cost to build public transportation in the USA is absolutely insane. The latest figures for light rail in Houston indicate it costs $126 million per mile to build. Houston's "inner loop" (most of the densest housing, central Houston area) is 9 miles by 11 miles, and accounts for just 15% of the city of Houston's land area, or <1% of Houston metro land area. In order to get a "light rail" (above-ground subway) within 0.5 miles of everyone in the just the inner loop, you'd need to build 400 miles of light rail: 18 lines going east-west, each 11 miles long, and 22 lines going north-south, each 9 miles long.

So at $150M per mile it would cost $50 billion to build this just for the inner loop, or $330 billion for the entire city of Houston, or $5 trillion for the Houston metropolitan area. Houston's budget last year was $6 billion, and the GDP of Houston metropolitan area is $513 billion/year.

Inner loop: 96 mi^2, 450,000 people

Houston city: 665 mi^2, 2.3M people

Houston metro: 10,062 mi^2, 7.2M people

Granted, if this was built for the inner loop of Houston, the density of both residential and office space would shoot up immensely. People would love to be able to genuinely get around without a car, and right now vehicle congestion is the #1 thing limiting most inner-loop neighborhoods from expanding any more.

But you're totally ignoring the Texas ethos. I'm going to do whatever I want on my land, and I don't want your train that does absolutely nothing for me to cut through my property is a very common point of view. As a land owner, you never get back once it's been given away. They only continue to want to take more. You do it once, you just show you're willing. This is something that takes the land away forever, not leasing with monthly payments for access like an oil well.

They really just need to wait until the older owners start to die off where their kids would rather have a check than the land. It might take a few more generations though. Generational land ownership is a helluva drug

The case you've presented is "China does it, so we should too", which is not all that strong of an argument.