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I'm passing along information I've acquired from reading results of studies - empirical observations - of some of the effects of rail transit, and the preferences people reveal through surveys.
Maybe just re-state my actual statements instead of making up your own more absolutist statements.
"Build an expensive rail to meet the business commuting needs of classes of people who are already WFH, telecommuting, telemeeting, etc" is not "only well off white collar workers". The particular point there is that, like overland high-speed internet being replaced by Starlink, it's an evolving model in which the need for physical transit is shrinking.
"You're describing a lot of people whose work places mostly aren't going to be near a HSR terminal" isn't "non-white collar people don't work in the impacted areas".
It doesn't matter what kinds of strawman statements are constructed - the non-leisure users of HSR between cities are going to overwhelmingly be white collar workers, particularly knowledge workers.
As always, every dollar spent benefits somebody. The questions are whom, and by how much. Just as EV subsidies tend to benefit people who already have money in pocket, and OAS without much lower income caps benefits people who are not living on low incomes, HSR benefits mostly people who don't need much assistance and could make do with existing solutions. Public funds being fungible and limited, expenditures on people who don't need help necessarily displaces funding of things that might be more productive or targeted at people with greater needs.
I'm confident that given the tendency of big projects to massively overrun cost and schedule, capital costs will be much higher than forecast. I'm confident that given the political reluctance to set fares high enough to cover operating costs, the relevant authorities will be scrambling to find other sources of money, which includes dipping into other pots, which includes other components of transit controlled by an authority. I'm confident that the forecasted economic figures provided by boosters are based on the most optomistic assumptions they can justify, and that the results will be lesser.
A lot of money, not necessarily where it will produce the most utility, sunk into one risk.
