The future of railroad transport in Texas

A recent commentary on Texas Tribune argues for the possibility of building a high-speed rail in Texas. This article is written by two conservatives who work in the railroad industry. Based on the recent success of the inner-city light rail in Dallas-Ft. Worth, the authors believe that light-rail is the optimal solution to the increasingly packed Texas cities. They took Austin for example, where the south-to-north-bound roads of the city can be easily paralyzed in rush hours due to a few accidents. Personally I think the authors suggestion about Austin makes sense. In this summer I drive on every weekday between University of Texas and my work place on Burnet road. In rush hours, the traffic flow can slow down very easily but hardly speeds up. Even a single vehicle trying to make a left turn can stop a whole lane. So I totally agree with the authors that Austin deserves a light rail transit.
The authors also make their efforts to convince their conservative partners that public rail transit is not a poison on conservatism. They argues that public rail transits spurs economic growth and help many poor people to get to work, which alleviates the government's duty in intervening the market. They further dismiss the concern about the railroads' being subsidized by the government. The authors illustrate with statistics that railroads need less subsidiary than the current highway system.
However, I want to make a point that the authors are overly optimistic about building a high-speed rail network in Texas. They propose that the high-speed rail can be built by private companies without government subsidiary, which is not very reasonable. In my home country China, the expense of building one kilometer of high-speed rail is 130 million RMB (16 million USD), not including the maintenance expenditure on these technologically complex systems. Hence, building a high-speed rail without government funding is almost impossible. Nevertheless, the authors are right about refining inner-city transit in Texas with light rails