Trains are very expensive to build and maintain, so they only work if your city has enough density to support them with sufficient ridership. America really screwed itself by building cities for cars instead of people, and it's hard to change this at this point, especially when every effort at making cities there more walkable and dense is met with fierce opposition.

I think the main problem with the Sounder is not a lack of density (Seattle and Tacoma are both plenty dense; also both the rail corridor and the rolling stock already exist; only missing expensive part is the crew) but rather it is on a very congested freight corridor (particularly the north part to Everett) owned partly by the freight company. So it is hard for Sound Transit to negotiate more usage of the corridor for increased frequency.

This is my understanding as well. The US tends to use rail more for freight transport than human transport compared to other parts of the world.

America has loads of cities and metro areas with way more density than European cities with effective rail systems. You’re right that it’s hard to change due to historical choices, but it may still be worthwhile to transition as soon as possible rather than continue down the wrong path.

Do we actually? European cities that I have been to all have zones with nothing but apartment buildings in dense urban configuration that go on for miles. I've never seen something like that in the states outside of NYC.

There's a select few. Boston. Washington DC. Chicago. The only city in which not owning a car does not involve sacrifice in your lifestyle is New York City.

Even before talking about traina, you'd need to get rids of the suburbs and the clear separation of housing and commercial stuff.

There is so much thing to undo and people are so overly sensitive of the value of their property it is nearly impossible or would take centuries to fix.

One war will do. Ask Europe.

WW2 was a negative step for many of the cities affected, as it gave them the chance to test the new "car" thing.

Dunno where you are, but trains suck arse here in the UK. Its half the price to fly to Edinburgh than to take a train and my wife recently took a stressful (delays and cancellations and missed connections) two and a half hour train ride that would have taken an hour.

Honestly I think busses are far superior due to not having so many dependencies.

I would have thought this was hyperbole had I not experienced this living in Kent years ago. It's in fact worse. It was twice as expensive to take a train from Canterbury to Stansted than it was to fly from Stansted to Glasgow. Still, having experienced public transport in the UK (the Underground is everything) and everywhere else, the US car culture is the worst. It keeps poor people poor. Your car breaks down, your license gets suspended you cannot go to work. And the acres of parking tarmac filled with cars that are stationary 95% of the time. It's so ugly and such a waste of resources. I happened to live and work along one of the few routes in my city where I could get the bus to work when I first moved to the US. People at work thought I was too poor to afford a car, it was always funny to explain that public transport is the norm in most of the rest of the world.

Trains are much worse in the UK than on the continent, for sure. Especially when it comes to price.