That's just factually false.

The reality is cites don't move, and population don't move very much either. And once you actually have fixed trains, population are even less likely to move. Many cities in Europe have literally been in the same place for 1000+ years.

Your augment might apply to mongolians in 1800s, but not to real existing western society.

Living in a country with amazing public transport, its just amazing what you can do. I was using public transport by myself when I was like 10, by 14 I was traveling all over the country and by 16 internationally without parents.

I can at any part of the day, randomly decide to go literally to any village above 100 people (and sometimes below), check and App that gives me a step by step guide how to get there. I have no fixed cost (if I don't want to) and then I can efficiently reach my destination while using almost no carbon. How is this not progressive? And btw, this can be done by anybody from 14 to late 70s. And this works right now, not in some amazing techno utopia future.

And I can use may laptop with high speed internet. I can easily go to a high quality bakery in between and get a high quality meal without losing any travel time either.

How non progressive it is to sit in a nice quite place with my laptop, eating a sand-witch driving threw beautiful country side.

A railway is simply the most efficient way to transport goods and people and if you have city and you have a lot of people, it will always be better then whatever 'individualized fancy AI pod' you imagine.

Notice how those companies working on all these individual pods eventually come back to 'platooning' and then 'docking'. Then they realize that operations on rubber wheels suck. Just slowly reinventing trains. The same techno future ideas existed in the 60s.

The fact is 2 cities exist, and will continue to exist. People will want to continue travel between them, that was true 100 years ago and its true today, and its still true in 100 years. Rail ways were the most environmentally friendly and efficient way to do that, both 100 years ago, and still today and it will still be true long into the future.

And its absolutely perfectly compatible with the most intelligent individual of transport, the bike. Getting on low impact, high threw-put trains to connect urban centers (urban doesn't mean big city) and then having individual transport in terms of bikes and e-bikes waiting for you is by far the most progressive and most innovative transport system you can design today. People on bikes will navigate more efficiency then whatever AI pods some California startup will come up with.

In Netherlands a staggering amount of people arrive at the train station by bike and they can easily pick up another bike when the arrive at their location. This is not only incredibly green, incredibly energy efficient, its also good for health and fitness (one of the biggest public health crisis) and road safety.

And the sad thing is, non of these are fancy high tech solution. These are literally all technologies that existed 50 years ago. But we should really way for some company to finally sell us some individualized EV pods that cost 40k$ per pod.