I sometimes wonder if we hadn’t already had roads made of asphalt and tires made of rubber, what would be a good material to provide the same kind of transport.

Given that cars don’t actually work that great off road, and we generally don’t need to drive off road on a daily basis, and that most roads only have one lane in each direction, we might as well have build rails everywhere and drive individual trains on those. Hell, make it elevated electrified monorail even to the last mile and it would likely have been cheaper and safer overall.