My point was that they're "decentralized" in the least interesting way: they exist as a "decentralized" structure only by overwhelming centralized effort. Calling them decentralized is like calling suburbia decentralized: it's not even wrong.

Decentralization is not a virtue (or end) in itself when it comes to public infrastructure. Robustness is also not intrinsically tied to it, and there are a variety of senses in which the American road network is not particularly robust: congestion and unsustainable funding schemes are just the first two that come to mind.

" in the least interesting way"

Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't.

You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.

> Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't.

You, ostensibly[1]!

> You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.

I'd be more than happy to take both :-)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html