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>>The fact is that we need to greatly reduce road building in America, and transfer the majority of the money into building state–of-the-art train systems like in Europe. A rational well-used mass transit system is key to our strategy,” he said, noting that such a transition would take several decades.

A key issue here is that most of Europe was built up pre-automobile, and thus is much, much more dense than most of the US. This is important when you are discussing what sort of transportation options make sense. Trains only work if you have significant density, lots of multi family housing in close proximity to the stations.

Post-automobile cities, particularly those in the Sunbelt, are built around the single family house in the suburbs. The density simply isn’t there.

Unfortunately, we have a large number of policy/media elites who live in NYC (Manhattan in particular) and DC. Manhattan was built out before the automobile, and has density such that trains do work. DC has a significant train system for the suburbs, but has the advantage of being the Imperial City on the Potomac, and thus this system was heavily subsidized by the rest of the country. This is not an option for, say, Indianapolis.

The city planner establishment has totally drunk the mass transit / greater density Kool-Aide, from what I can see. People still largely want to live in single family houses, though “walkability” is something people do like. The two concepts are at odds with each other.

I see trains as a 19th Centuy solution to 21st Century transportation problems. For me it’s like continuing to use hardwired circuit-switched networks when the packet-switched Internet has been the way to go for 20+ years. People like the much greater flexibility afforded by cars. With Uber and the coming autonomous cars, roads are seeing and will see a utility jump.

Trains should only be expanded in the most dense of locations. They make no sense at all in places like the Inland Empire of California, which is essentially where Brown’s train to nowhere is being built.

There needs to be a much more robust public discussion of this issue, and people should not just let the train fanatics and density mavens who tend to dominate the city planning establishment rule the day.

Central Planning is at its most hypocritical nonsense when we look at Transportation.

Here in Atlanta, the MARTA station at the intersection of the two rapid transit lines was intentionally designed to be surrounded by open space and sparse commercial. Yet, the only way for mass transit to be profitable is for transit stations to be the center of dense residential or employment centers. Result? The rest of you pay for Atlanta’s mass transit.

Here in Atlanta, Mister Rogers Neighborhood Trolley has been built to compete with MARTA. The motivation behind it has been purely emotional and nostalgic. There is no logic behind it on any level.

Nationwide, any competent technocrat will tell you that in the US, heavy cargo should be taken away from trucks on the highway and placed on rail. Passengers should be placed on the highways, not on rail. Heavy trucks break up the cement and asphalt and cause much resurfacing and rebuilding of highways. Heavy trucks have a longer stopping distance. So they leave long distance in front of them when driving. Faster traffic lane changers use that space in front of heavy trucks to change lanes. This is the root cause of many crashes, loss of many lives.

But emotional central planners push for Amtrak to get in the way of efficient railroad traffic.

Central Planning claims to be technocratic, logical, data based, scientific. But inevitably, it is nostalgic for something that only existed in Mr Rogers Neighborhood or some other entertainment fantasy. Inevitably it is emotional and ideologically driven and not logical at all.

Me and my wife recently took the light rail through the middle of Baltimore on the way to the airport. We had no clue as to what was coming in central Baltimore, but we did make it, because thankfully we sat at the front of the ‘train’, near the conductor - just to be better able to see where we were going. Never met those kinds of people when driving to the airport.

It seemed a great way to get to the airport, but never again. They can keep it.

Focus on improving “high density” over “sprawl” creates “core areas” that also tend to higher rents/mortgages in the core, and over time increase “sprawl” anyway as the not subsidized middle class “wants room for families” and less income needing to go to housing.

Higher density cores also increase greater income inequality within them as, on a percentage basis, they become less affordable to the middle class and housing mostly higher incomes and those getting some sort of subsidy or government supplied “affordable housing”.

That density also NEEDS the mass transit. What “higher density” and mass transit are is actually public policy that demands the CREATION of the need for the policy it advocates.