You are very wrong. Highways are not subsidized. Highway construction and maintenance comes directly from highway drivers by way of fuel taxes, generating a huge amount of money. So drivers are directly paying the costs to create & use highways.
No such thing for rail. Riders don't come close to the cost for paying for the construction and upkeep of rail systems.
In fact, much of the money used to subsidize rail comes from gasoline taxes paid for by car drivers.
That is why there is so much scorn for light passenger rail. It is a great idea to join high density areas together, but it is an idiotic idea everywhere else because the users getting the benefit pay a tiny fraction of the actual cost while people who never use the system pay most of the cost. Frankly, it would be cheaper to have a fleet of small buses drive people around for free, than to run trains virtually empty all day long.
When it comes to highways, their construction and upkeep is being directly paid for by drivers, especially commercial drivers who pay a large share of the fuel taxes (of course those big semis do massive damage to pavement as well, so that is fair).
As long as I am pointing out your errors, where to put Sacramento Light Rail wasn't a political decision. It was a short-sighted economic decision to place them on existing abandoned railroad right of way they could buy cheaply or get donated for quid pro quo. They hoped that running light rail along existing highway corridors, I-80, I-5 and highway 50, would get people out of their cars, which it hasn't. By the time you commute from your suburb to the highway, you don't want to park at a LRT station and wait 20 minutes for a train. The idiots should have placed the LRT lines away from existing highway corridors and then planned to build up the areas along the new LRT corridor, so people who like trains could live near them and never have to drive to the highway. This would also cut the driving time down for people who don't want to drive to work since they could live where they had local LRT stations, not have to drive to a highway to get to one. But then Sacramento planning has always been whored out to the highest developer anyway, so there was never a snowball's chance in hell that Sacramento would actually plan LRT correctly. They could have run station directly up through Rocklin, Loomis, Roseville and Elk Grove, etc. and allowed people to walk/short drive to the LRT stations, placing the highest density condos/apartments closest to the LRT stations. Idiots whored out, put the trains on cheap existing right of way, and then let developers fill in the land furthers from everything - rail and highway. Idiots.
I think we can agree that Sacramento’s light rail was botched.
Way back when Sacramento had a choice between joining BART and connecting to the Bay Area or having their own Toonerville Trolley the shortsighted pols - led by Anne Rudin and Phil Isenberg - chose light rail saying that BART would take jobs out of Sacramento. So, instead, there’s some 20,000 people per day commuting from Sacramento down the I-80 to the Bay Area and the ones who take the Amtrak (CalTrans, really) Capitol train have made it the second money-maker for Amtrak after the Boston-DC corridor.