Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks.

How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?

Are you suggesting that you cant get to Home Depot without a self driving smart car?

> A train can't take me to the beach

Yes it can!! Why can't a train take you to the beach?

https://www.amtrak.com/top-beach-destinations-by-train

> It can't take me camping away from civilization.

How many vehicle miles do you travel every year? How many of those are to go camping?

> It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.

Have you tried? Like really tried? https://philsturgeon.com/carry-shit-olympics/

> but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.

I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this:

> I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.

That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer.

My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.