Looking from outside, the ability to act together as a society to achieve a socially desirable outcome seems to slipping in the West. There's a point where the balance in society between duties and entitlements seems to have flipped.

The issue seems to be scale. Governments aren't willing to take on large scale projects, because they're hard and long. They want to do (new) things that are easy with a short term return on investment.

Thinking about it, it feels a bit like a modern company. Instead of managers wanting to show that they did something good to get a raise, instead we have politicians that try to show that they did something good to get reelected.

Plenty of places in Europe are just as diverse as the US and still manage to come together and collectively fund important civil and social priorities.

Maybe you're just trolling; I can't really tell.

>Plenty of places in Europe are just as diverse as the US and still manage to come together and collectively fund important civil and social priorities.

Mind naming some ?

Europe is relatively homogeneous ethnically and racially compared to the US. The exception could be largest metropolitan areas, but even there I'd say US is more heterogeneous.

Not saying anything in support of arguments related to this just saying I don't know what plenty of places you'd compare to US.

This seems like a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

Spain is the obvious one that stands out.

Spain is a pretty terrible example of "great public cooperation between different groups" - do you know anything about it's history or the situation with Basque ?

Also it's not really a good example of efficient public projects or a well functioning state compared more developed EU countries or the US.

I recently did a little research on traveling from the US southwest to the US midwest. I wanted to avoid the hostility of US commercial air travel and was looking at alternatives to driving a car. Driving a car was going to be a two day ordeal with a hotel stop somewhere.

Turns out driving a car across the US is faster than Amtrak, even with an overnight stop at a hotel.

AZ -> IL:

  26 hours by car + 8 hour hotel stay

  35 hour train ride.

  $120-150 gas + $100 hotel

  $600 train ticket

Of course a plane ticket is < $200 and just a handful of hours. I wouldn't expect Amtrak to compete with those. But if you can't compete with a Ford Fusion over an 1800 mile journey...

I made the same calculation getting from San Jose to Portland. I wanted to avoid air travel, so I checked the train. I'm taking four people.

    Air: $628 and about 5 hours (security, parking, etc)
    Train: $312 for coach, 21 hours (driving on each end)
    Train: $750 for a room for four
    My van: $120 gas, no hotel, 12 hours door to door w/ stops.  

The car is maybe $300 if you include wear and tear. But as a bonus, I have a car for my week in Portland. To have that same benefit with the other transit, I'd have to rent a car for a few hundred dollars at the other end.

Heck, I could pay someone to drive my van for me for about $150 each way, and still break even with the train but save time.

It's only cheaper because you're ignoring wear and tear (aka maintenance), depreciation and insurance in your calculation. Not to mention it's incredibly unsafe to do a 26h ride in two days instead of three - you don't want to do a 13h ride, so realistically you're looking at two days of some motel to stay over night.

For what it's worth a proper high speed train could do a 10 hour run at 300-350 km/h. Not exactly the ~900 km/h of your typical airplane, but at least you 'll have a decent seat over the travel time.

A 10-13h drive (with breaks) on a modern (say > 2009) car is surprisingly non-strenuous on US interstates. I've done it and it was not onerous. The driving experience in the U.S. is markedly different from other countries -- interstates are wide and relatively smooth-flowing outside major cities, and rest stops are plentiful.

To most Europeans a >10h drive sounds excessive, and that might be the case in certain parts of Europe, but the U.S. is (perhaps unfortunately, from an environmental perspective) built around the automobile, and the driving experience here is somehow different (i.e. easier).

I've driven in Germany and while I enjoyed spending hours cruising on the Autobahn (A-8), parts of the journey involved driving on tiny, narrow roads in small towns. Those segments were frustrating. I haven't yet tried it, but I don't think I'd be able to drive > 5 hours in Europe (but I could be wrong).

I find the more frustrating part of driving on the Autobahn being the constant changes in speed limit. You cant just cruise 170kmh all the way, since theres so many construction along the way plus the random 90kmh zone here and there.

Phoenix to Chicago is about 1700 miles. At 70mph moving average it's a 25 hour drive. Trucking regulations allow a 14 hour drive, ten hours rest followed by I believe a 12 hour drive. It might be strenous but it's not dangerous.

Also keep in mind 1700 miles at the IRS standard deduction of 55 cents a mile is $935. Assuming your car seats four (and all four seats are in use) that breaks down to just under $200/person.

> Trucking regulations allow a 14 hour drive

Whoa, WTF? In Europe, it's 8 hours regularly with 2x a week allowance of 10 hours (to be used e.g. in case of massive traffic jams), followed by at least 11 hours.

Why is there some physiological reason that makes longer drives unsafe? In my experience I can drive as long as I can stay awake, which I can certainly do for 13 hours in a stretch (and then some). I find it easier to be the driver than a passenger, for that matter, as at least I have something to do.

Even if you can manage to stay alert for so long, wide parts of the population cannot, which is why maximum limits have been introduced for commercial drivers everywhere (and accidents rates have fallen correspondingly), and why in accidents drivers who have been on the road too long are generally found to be at least partially at fault.

Additionally, who says you're actually able to drive safely after 13 hours and react to something like, let's say, a child hopping in front of your car and that you just have been extremely lucky?

Or, for 4 passengers, $120-170 gas + $100-200 hotel, which is still cheaper than a single seat on Amtrak.

One thing to note is that the bullet trains in Japan are also expensive to ride. A 300km, 1hr20min train ride costs $100/person.

But it still works out, because driving is also expensive - the highway network in Japan is privatized, and the tolls are pretty steep. The tolls for the same trip as above are $40. Add to that the cost of gas and parking, and driving only ends up being cheaper once you're several people sharing a ride.

> The article asks "why can't we have one?"

Because the geography of the US is quite different from Japan. In Japan you follow the coasts to reach each city: it's a straight line to simplify things. In the US you would need a lot more tracks to cover the territory, and tracks are super expensive to build and maintain.

I'm sorry, I think reducing the lack of modern rail in the United States to "because the geography is different" almost completely misses the mark. We don't have anything close to this, anywhere. There are plenty of places in the US with equally simple geography and fewer earthquake considerations, and it's still not implemented.

That is almost entirely due to issues with politics and public policy. The actual physical construction of the rails would easily be the most simple part of the process. As you pointed out, maintenance would have costs, but it's not like existing rails don't include similar costs as well. Certainly there are many parts of the US where those costs would be lower than the equivalent in Japan anyway, since their climate is generally more temperamental than say, almost anywhere along the US West Coast.

I totally agree with this assessment. Road building and maintenance has huge costs too, but those come from general revenue in the US so people don’t notice it.

It was a choice in the US to build the free-to-use interstate system just as it was a choice in Japan to build the shinkansen. The highway system in Japan is not free; it is tolled and it costs roughly the same in tolls for a single person to drive vs use the shinkansen. Local trains in most cities are good too. With these policies, applied over decades, trains became the default mode of transportation.

Also, Japan is very mountainous making it probably one of the most expensive countries To build rail in. But it’s a moot point because they managed to build up a national highway system as well as a it national train system, I think proving that it’s a matter of policy and not geography.

The other common argument is difference in population density, but this also misses the mark for 2 reasons. First of all, the US had a pretty impressive network of rail before it has an impressive highway system, it’s just mostly used for freight now and policy for public transportation shifted to roads. Second, at least the 2 coasts have high population density more or less covered by a straight line which ought to be well served by fast trains.

Everyone has roads at all stages in their development. It's not an either-or. But based on a few historical samples, it seems like developing nations (US a century ago included) build national rail lines to support rapid development. Then build interstates (or some equivalent, assuming they are big enough to need them) to upgrade their highway system after being fully developed.

No, Japan is terrible for building bullet train infrastructure. It's so mountainous that building straight enough track requires lots of expensive tunnel drilling. The new maglev is something like 90% tunnels. The places in the US where there would be demand for a bullet train have much more straightforward geography.

You lack knowledge of Japan.

I live in Japan. Wrong assumption.

Then you don't know the geography of the country you live in. The Shinkansen goes through numerous tunnels in it's normal route.

Then you are clueless about shinkansen and geography. I also live in Japan.