It is an odd blind spot that a lot of the more intelligent ones can at least acknowledge upon confrontation of the dynamics between associated costs, benefits, and involved scales. A regular at a bar I go to who occasionally gets mildly political brought up a train line project that had been shot down before construction. I confronted him with the question of how many daily riders it takes before a train route becomes better than a route of chartered planes or buses, and pointed out that the city at one end of the line wasn't a bustling metropolis nor likely to grow into one. He accepted the point quickly and mentioned that he had never even been confronted by the idea that "the scale is wrong for this solution" before.
The real problem is that you can't have grand government projects to create a plane line allowing 800 commuters to go from city A to city B 200 miles apart every day, because you don't need a grand government effort to facilitate the acquiring of a 200 mile long stretch of land to build it.