I don't have the study readily at hand, but per-kilometer costs for rail infrastructure are 5-10 times higher in the US than in developed countries like Spain a

I don't have the study readily at hand, but per-kilometer costs for rail infrastructure are 5-10 times higher in the US than in developed countries like Spain and Germany, and 20-40 times higher than in developing countries like China and India. Labour costs do play a major role in the 4x cost differential between developing and developed countries -- as do higher land acquisition / right-of-way re-engineering costs, and greater safety regulations. That does not, explain the 5x-10x cost differential between the rest of the developed world and the US. That difference is explained by the fact that in the US, corruption is legal. Transport projects are always optimised for the value they will create for the greatest number of beneficiaries. In the rest of the world, "beneficiaries" means "people who will use the transport system, or benefit from its secondary effects such as economic uplift". In the US, "beneficiaries" means "campaign contributors". Those campaign contributors are, primarily, unions and corporations. The more union jobs are created, the more political support a project will receive. The more money goes to corporations (eg., PFI often just ensures that 20%-30% of the cost of the project ends up being interest payments to private banks.), the more political support a project will receive. Union donations swing democratic and corporate donations swing republican, so if you want bipartisan support for a project, you need to ensure that both sides are feeding generously at the trough. So you see, in this system, the cost is the benefit, and its correlation to actual beneficiaries (eg., the general public) is tenuous at best. It's insanely corrupt. This pattern of corruption is not unique to public transport infrastructure: it can be seen most egregiously in the defence sector. I honestly believe that, left unchecked, this will undermine both America's economic and military competitiveness to an ultimately fatal degree. (FWIW: I was born in Silicon Valley, and 10 years ago when I decided that I wanted to work on real transport infrastructure innovation, I emigrated to the UK. The US political system is simply too broken to get anything done, and offers no hope of any change in the future.)