They're trying to build a train system in my town (Seattle.) I live in the middle of the city in a major neighborhood. If there are no cost overruns (hah) or sc

They're trying to build a train system in my town (Seattle.) I live in the middle of the city in a major neighborhood. If there are no cost overruns (hah) or schedule slips (anyone want to bet on that?) then I will have access to one train stop, about a mile away by foot down an extremely steep hill. That station will, admittedly, connect me to interesting places I can go in the city, after two transfers and about an hour's travel time. I will have this station, at the cost of $54 billion, in _nineteen years_. If everything goes exactly as planned. Uber can get me anywhere I want to go, for $8 or so, in fifteen minutes, today. I don't like cars much either, and because of the calculus above, traffic is only getting worse. But you want to know why we don't have trains? Because America can no longer build infrastructure. In any sane country we could do this in five years at a tenth of the price, but for whatever reason, we can't. This is the only reason Uber exists at the scale it does: because it's a workaround for the fact we can no longer build anything requiring fixed infrastructure. (By the way, talk about an industry ripe for disruption. What I wouldn't give for a good construction startup.)