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.