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Not last. Not first. Not all powerful. Not feckless. Americans act like their government is representative of governments. It isn't. They act like everything n

Not last. Not first. Not all powerful. Not feckless. Americans act like their government is representative of governments. It isn't. They act like everything needs to be invented there. It doesn't. They believe that America is the greatest country in the world. It isn't. If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada, and many other places are well run and have a great deal of governmental involvement. America is hobbled by its own broken political system that nobody would replicate if they were starting from scratch today. It's essentially the PHP of government systems. Dominant, but broken.

refurb 8y ago
OK, I get it, the US being a superpower is under a microscope and every imperfection is called out so other countries can look down their nose at it. That's fine. But what are you talking about? What could the US learn from Canada on asset forfeiture? Canada does it too! How to do it better? And as a Canadian, saying the gov't run their is better is purely laughable.
- woolvalley 8y ago
  Go live in the USA, and you'll see the multiple ways it's more broken than Canada. Many other friends who have moved over from other developed countries collaborate the experience. I'm in the bay area, maybe it's just a special kind of broken that you don't see in other places in the USA, but things like flint, michigan also exist in the USA.
  - refurb 8y ago
    I do live in the US. And you know what? I think there is plenty the US has to offer that Canada doesn't. That's why I'm here.
    - untog 8y ago
      I agree that the US offers a whole lot that other countries do not. I would disagree that the US government offers anything other governments do not. Of course, the US government has a role in the other attractive attributes the US has, but I personally think that role is exaggerated. I think the US would still be an economically dominant world power if it had the government of, say, Germany.
      - icelancer 8y ago
        >> I would disagree that the US government offers anything other governments do not. You are very first-world centric, then. While I am no interventionist, you are discounting the role the US Military has worldwide on trade, peacekeeping, and other vital roles it actually does a good job at when it's not fucking things up (which is often). >> I think the US would still be an economically dominant world power if it had the government of, say, Germany. Including the racial makeup of Germany and the immigration policies?
        JackCh 8y ago
        Are you trying to suggest that the racial makeup of Germany is inferior to America? I'd say population size, geographic properties (location, climate, resources, etc) and economic history count for much more than any racial inferiority. Germany has a population 25% as large as America, and a GDP 18% of America's. So maybe if you ignored history, geography, a potential nonlinear relationship between population and economic domination¹ you could claim this discrepancy is solely due to racial differences between the populations of America and Germany. But I'm pretty damn skeptical of that. 1: for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market
        icelancer 8y ago
        >> inferior Uh, no. Just that it is vastly different and that it is a relevant data point.
  - Turing_Machine 8y ago
    Canadians as a whole apparently disagree. There are about ~700,000 Americans living in Canada, and also about ~700,000 Canadians living in the U.S. (see links below) However, the U.S. population is more than 8x that of Canada. That means that on a proportional basis, Canadians are about 8x more likely to move to the U.S. than Americans are to move to Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_Sta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
    - Turing_Machine 8y ago
      Those links offer some other interesting comparisons. There are about 700,000 U.K. citizens living in the U.S., and only about 160,000 U.S. citizens living in the U.K. The populations are about 63 million and 320 million, respectively. On a proportional basis, one would expect to see 5x more Americans living in the U.K., but in fact, there are 4x more U.K. citizens living in the U.S. Similar ratios apply for other countries. Germany has 1/4 the population of the U.S., but there are 5 times as many Germans living in the U.S. as there are Americans living in Germany. Voting with your feet never lies.
      - selectodude 8y ago
        The US has always had a much more liberal immigration policy for ROW. Moving to the EU as an American is nigh on impossible. If was even remotely easy I'd have done it years and years ago. Granted, that doesn't say anything positive about the immigration policy of Germany when 30 year old children can get in and I don't stand a chance. Oh well.
    - JackCh 8y ago
      Maybe this says more about climate than it does about governments. Of course if that's true, that people care more about the weather than the government, maybe that in itself is saying something.
- ironchef 8y ago
  what I inferred from the other post was that governments are complex... and each government has some things they do well.. and some things they do poorly (not necessarily just re: asset forfeiture). For example one could argue that the US could look at other governments to see alternatives for how to manage healthcare differently (or perhaps even just portions of it)
- jboles 8y ago
  > What could the US learn from Canada on asset forfeiture? Canada does it too! How to do it better? So does the UK, Australia, NZ, and many other countries. But somehow only the US has wannabe-military police rambo types doing it, to stock up their SWAT vans, machine guns and other gizmos. That does not exactly inspire confidence.
  - selectodude 8y ago
    https://reporter.anu.edu.au/files/styles/anu_full_920_518/public/Advance.jpg https://reporter.anu.edu.au/files/styles/anu_full_920_518/pu... Hey look, Aussie SWAT.
    - jboles 8y ago
      Not exactly just a phone call away though
  - JackCh 8y ago
    Personally I prefer that US police look ugly and militaristic when they do it, since that sort of poor PR will work against them in the long run. If they presented themselves with a peaceful and calm aesthetic, the problem of asset forfeiture would be that much harder to mobilize the public against.
orf 8y ago
A thousand times this. I'm not saying the UK is some shining beacon of how to run a country but I do think overall our governmental systems are pretty sensible. I think being sensible might be a stereotypical English trait, but it's true. For example you have to comply with the spirit of a law, not the exact text. Also our QC's are pretty level headed and the same goes for our police force. Nobody is overly nitpicky about things, and when they are it's sensible. At least in my experience, YMMV. US could learn a lot if they looked outward, but I don't think that's in their nature.
- refurb 8y ago
  You mean like arresting people when they say something the gov't doesn't like? [1] I'll take a pass, thank you. [1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-in-london-a7064246.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...
  - jboles 8y ago
    I'll gladly take that, and a government that generally tries to look after its citizens, over one that is downright hostile to and steals from citizens.
  - orf 8y ago
    Couple of thousand fines in a city of 8,700,000 seems sensible to me. Not everyone values free speech quite as highly as the USA. It's important, sure, but it's not live or die. There are limits and spreading vile hate speech is one of them. I also like the complete focus on the free speech aspect, completely ignoring the "we actually deal with racists here" aspect. How narrow minded.
    - core-questions 8y ago
      Let's keep in mind here that there are many definitions of hate speech. In Canada, it's carefully defined as speech that actually incites people to a criminal act - so racism or other "vile speech" on its own doesn't qualify, you have to be actively making a credible threat or incitement to have others commit real actions.
core-questions 8y ago
> If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada, and many other places are well run and have a great deal of governmental involvement. One big problem with this approach is that it basically pretends that the American citizenry is interchangeable with those of the countries you mentioned. It's not. Identity politics problems, legacies of slavery and of the colonial / revolutionary mindset are still big issues. The people of Detroit and of Baltimore and of other ruined American cities are not the same as the people of Norway or of Japan. The solutions that work in high-intelligence, high-trust, coherent communities with strong traditions of work ethic won't work in every environment. You want to use PHP as a metaphor? I'll use NFSv3/NIS. They're simple to run and work great on a small network where you trust everyone completely. The moment there's a malicious party at work they become hopeless and you need to either put in incredible amounts of work to try to lock them down, or switch to a much more restrictive, secure-by-default option.
- romwell 8y ago
  >Metaphor >small network The population of the EU is 741.4 million, the area is 1,707,642 sq miles. There are quite a few things that are prevalent in the EU, and are nonexistent in the US (public healthcare and higher education, for starters; throw public transportation into the mix, and have a party). Don't pretend the EU is Norway.
  - sshine 8y ago
    Norway isn't even in the EU.
  - space_fountain 8y ago
    I'm not sure if that's what they meant, but regardless. Remember that there are plenty of places in the EU where things aren't going particular well. I also remember online lots of grandstanding about the US's questionable policies around imigrants as compared to Europe. I haven't really heard them in a bit.
- whack 8y ago
392c91e8165b 8y ago
I'm not convinced that the US government is more broken than the others you list. Most people killed by a government are killed not by police forces, but rather by armies, navies and air forces. And if you live in or near the US you have a lower chance of being killed in a war than if you live in or near Europe because although the US starts more small wars, it starts fewer big wars, and most people killed in war are killed in big wars. Europe has started fewer wars and killed fewer people since 1945 than the US has, and this is a sign that Europe is safer for the average resident or neighbor than the US is, but that sign is more than cancelled out by Europe's record (and Japan's record) before 1945. Over the centuries, most prolonged rivalries and most expensive arms races between European nations ended in a war. In contrast, the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race between the US and the USSR did not end in a war -- at least not a war in which the most lethal available weapons were used or in which civilians were targeted to the extent that civilians were targeted by European and Japanese governments during WW II. Surely, the USSR's government deserves some of the credit for that surprisingly good outcome, but so does the US government. And if you want to claim that the US did not have to participate in the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race -- if you want to argue that the fact that it did is a sign that the US is badly governed, you have to face the fact that if it had not participated, all of Europe would've been overrun by the USSR. There was far less political will in Western Europe to prepare for yet another war than would've been necessary to resist an invasion from the USSR if the US hadn't paid for most of the preparations. I do not conclude from this analysis that the US government is better than most governments -- only that it is not clear to me that it is definitely worse. And I think it is a mistake to draw a boundary at 1945 and claim that anything that happened before then was too long ago to have any bearing on the question of which of today's governments are better.
skookumchuck 8y ago
It is the greatest country in the world, despite its problems. For example, since 2016, CNN has been attempting to destroy the Trump Presidency 24/7, without any of their reporters being harassed, disappeared, imprisoned, dying in mysterious accidents, etc. It takes a great country for that to happen.
icelancer 8y ago
>> If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. People in America are not generally ready to accept the immigration policies of Western Europe, nor do we have the luxury of a military power that we can free-ride off of. Your comparison is simplistic and wrong.
rayiner 8y ago
The older I get, the more I suspect that the problem isn’t our system, but Americans. Take something like the NYC subway. It’s a disaster while London’s Tube works fine. The usual excuses (not enough money) don’t work—the NYC metro has double the operating costs per passenger trip, even though the systems are very similar. Maybe Americans just aren’t very good at government. This is not so crazy a concept. When I was in Tokyo I marveled at how people would walk several blocks to get to a cross walk. Here in DC, people jay walk like it’s going out of style. That’s when it hit me that it’s no surprise Metro is a disaster while Tokyo’s trains work great.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  I think a major problem with it is apathy, which is abundant, and can explain most ways government works worse in America (and why there should be less of it). Granted, I still don't agree that things are oh-so-bad in the U.S. Every time we bring up an issue, the Americans and foreigners alike gasp and point fingers, but this sort of stuff happens all over the world, just maybe not this exact problem in other English speaking nations. What this does show is that we shouldn't expect government approaches which at least somewhat function in other countries to work well in the U.S.
- dfraser992 8y ago
  I'm American, but I live in the UK and am currently working on a research project for Network Rail to investigate how machine learning might be used to improve performance. So I've been reading up on rail networks in general. The Tube is mostly great, but there are issues; the public generally doesn't see them (but I guess you've never been in London at rush hour?). The UK rail network however is a disaster. Privatization has made things worse - organizational chaos because of too many overlapping responsibilities between all the companies / not enough coordination. And the profit motive of course screws up things for what ought to be treated as a public utility. The latest disaster (the re-timetabling of GTR's services) was badly planned, managed, and executed. It's not "government" in general - my opinion is Americans in general are a lot more organized than the British in a fundamental sense. Europe is one a model of exactly how to run things - but at a certain cost to passengers. There is enough buffer space left in the timetable to deal with possible delays or problems, and so services are relatively infrequent, but on the whole punctual. Thus passengers have to adjust their lives for that. The UK however does not do that - buffer space is eaten up to stick freight trains in whenever possible and any issues with them (plus issues with passenger trains) cascade. And UK passengers have always had train services available at the drop of a hat (metaphorically) - the social cost to move over to the EU style of doing things would make a lot of people very unhappy. The GTR disaster is an example of how socially disruptive changes are, especially when badly managed. Japan is of course super organized, so they have train services down to the very second. The UK only labels trains as 'late' if they arrive more than 3 minutes late... As for NYC, yeah, they have a lot of issues. Old tracks, underfunded, but mostly bad management decisions in trying to solve one problem and it snowballs - the NY Times have had some good articles on exactly what is going wrong. It is like no one has been paying attention to all the OR research in this area, but that seems to be normal - the gap between theory and what's actually is done in industry is quite large.

refurb 8y ago

OK, I get it, the US being a superpower is under a microscope and every imperfection is called out so other countries can look down their nose at it. That's fine. But what are you talking about? What could the US learn from Canada on asset forfeiture? Canada does it too! How to do it better? And as a Canadian, saying the gov't run their is better is purely laughable.

woolvalley 8y ago
Go live in the USA, and you'll see the multiple ways it's more broken than Canada. Many other friends who have moved over from other developed countries collaborate the experience. I'm in the bay area, maybe it's just a special kind of broken that you don't see in other places in the USA, but things like flint, michigan also exist in the USA.
- refurb 8y ago
  I do live in the US. And you know what? I think there is plenty the US has to offer that Canada doesn't. That's why I'm here.
  - untog 8y ago
    I agree that the US offers a whole lot that other countries do not. I would disagree that the US government offers anything other governments do not. Of course, the US government has a role in the other attractive attributes the US has, but I personally think that role is exaggerated. I think the US would still be an economically dominant world power if it had the government of, say, Germany.
    - icelancer 8y ago
      >> I would disagree that the US government offers anything other governments do not. You are very first-world centric, then. While I am no interventionist, you are discounting the role the US Military has worldwide on trade, peacekeeping, and other vital roles it actually does a good job at when it's not fucking things up (which is often). >> I think the US would still be an economically dominant world power if it had the government of, say, Germany. Including the racial makeup of Germany and the immigration policies?
      - JackCh 8y ago
        Are you trying to suggest that the racial makeup of Germany is inferior to America? I'd say population size, geographic properties (location, climate, resources, etc) and economic history count for much more than any racial inferiority. Germany has a population 25% as large as America, and a GDP 18% of America's. So maybe if you ignored history, geography, a potential nonlinear relationship between population and economic domination¹ you could claim this discrepancy is solely due to racial differences between the populations of America and Germany. But I'm pretty damn skeptical of that. 1: for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market
        icelancer 8y ago
        >> inferior Uh, no. Just that it is vastly different and that it is a relevant data point.
- Turing_Machine 8y ago
  Canadians as a whole apparently disagree. There are about ~700,000 Americans living in Canada, and also about ~700,000 Canadians living in the U.S. (see links below) However, the U.S. population is more than 8x that of Canada. That means that on a proportional basis, Canadians are about 8x more likely to move to the U.S. than Americans are to move to Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_Sta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
  - Turing_Machine 8y ago
    Those links offer some other interesting comparisons. There are about 700,000 U.K. citizens living in the U.S., and only about 160,000 U.S. citizens living in the U.K. The populations are about 63 million and 320 million, respectively. On a proportional basis, one would expect to see 5x more Americans living in the U.K., but in fact, there are 4x more U.K. citizens living in the U.S. Similar ratios apply for other countries. Germany has 1/4 the population of the U.S., but there are 5 times as many Germans living in the U.S. as there are Americans living in Germany. Voting with your feet never lies.
    - selectodude 8y ago
      The US has always had a much more liberal immigration policy for ROW. Moving to the EU as an American is nigh on impossible. If was even remotely easy I'd have done it years and years ago. Granted, that doesn't say anything positive about the immigration policy of Germany when 30 year old children can get in and I don't stand a chance. Oh well.
  - JackCh 8y ago
    Maybe this says more about climate than it does about governments. Of course if that's true, that people care more about the weather than the government, maybe that in itself is saying something.
ironchef 8y ago
what I inferred from the other post was that governments are complex... and each government has some things they do well.. and some things they do poorly (not necessarily just re: asset forfeiture). For example one could argue that the US could look at other governments to see alternatives for how to manage healthcare differently (or perhaps even just portions of it)
jboles 8y ago
> What could the US learn from Canada on asset forfeiture? Canada does it too! How to do it better? So does the UK, Australia, NZ, and many other countries. But somehow only the US has wannabe-military police rambo types doing it, to stock up their SWAT vans, machine guns and other gizmos. That does not exactly inspire confidence.
- selectodude 8y ago
  https://reporter.anu.edu.au/files/styles/anu_full_920_518/public/Advance.jpg https://reporter.anu.edu.au/files/styles/anu_full_920_518/pu... Hey look, Aussie SWAT.
  - jboles 8y ago
    Not exactly just a phone call away though
- JackCh 8y ago
  Personally I prefer that US police look ugly and militaristic when they do it, since that sort of poor PR will work against them in the long run. If they presented themselves with a peaceful and calm aesthetic, the problem of asset forfeiture would be that much harder to mobilize the public against.

orf 8y ago

A thousand times this. I'm not saying the UK is some shining beacon of how to run a country but I do think overall our governmental systems are pretty sensible. I think being sensible might be a stereotypical English trait, but it's true. For example you have to comply with the spirit of a law, not the exact text. Also our QC's are pretty level headed and the same goes for our police force. Nobody is overly nitpicky about things, and when they are it's sensible. At least in my experience, YMMV. US could learn a lot if they looked outward, but I don't think that's in their nature.

refurb 8y ago
You mean like arresting people when they say something the gov't doesn't like? [1] I'll take a pass, thank you. [1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-in-london-a7064246.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...
- jboles 8y ago
  I'll gladly take that, and a government that generally tries to look after its citizens, over one that is downright hostile to and steals from citizens.
- orf 8y ago
  Couple of thousand fines in a city of 8,700,000 seems sensible to me. Not everyone values free speech quite as highly as the USA. It's important, sure, but it's not live or die. There are limits and spreading vile hate speech is one of them. I also like the complete focus on the free speech aspect, completely ignoring the "we actually deal with racists here" aspect. How narrow minded.
  - core-questions 8y ago
    Let's keep in mind here that there are many definitions of hate speech. In Canada, it's carefully defined as speech that actually incites people to a criminal act - so racism or other "vile speech" on its own doesn't qualify, you have to be actively making a credible threat or incitement to have others commit real actions.

core-questions 8y ago

> If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada, and many other places are well run and have a great deal of governmental involvement. One big problem with this approach is that it basically pretends that the American citizenry is interchangeable with those of the countries you mentioned. It's not. Identity politics problems, legacies of slavery and of the colonial / revolutionary mindset are still big issues. The people of Detroit and of Baltimore and of other ruined American cities are not the same as the people of Norway or of Japan. The solutions that work in high-intelligence, high-trust, coherent communities with strong traditions of work ethic won't work in every environment. You want to use PHP as a metaphor? I'll use NFSv3/NIS. They're simple to run and work great on a small network where you trust everyone completely. The moment there's a malicious party at work they become hopeless and you need to either put in incredible amounts of work to try to lock them down, or switch to a much more restrictive, secure-by-default option.

romwell 8y ago
>Metaphor >small network The population of the EU is 741.4 million, the area is 1,707,642 sq miles. There are quite a few things that are prevalent in the EU, and are nonexistent in the US (public healthcare and higher education, for starters; throw public transportation into the mix, and have a party). Don't pretend the EU is Norway.
- sshine 8y ago
  Norway isn't even in the EU.
- space_fountain 8y ago
  I'm not sure if that's what they meant, but regardless. Remember that there are plenty of places in the EU where things aren't going particular well. I also remember online lots of grandstanding about the US's questionable policies around imigrants as compared to Europe. I haven't really heard them in a bit.
whack 8y ago

392c91e8165b 8y ago

I'm not convinced that the US government is more broken than the others you list. Most people killed by a government are killed not by police forces, but rather by armies, navies and air forces. And if you live in or near the US you have a lower chance of being killed in a war than if you live in or near Europe because although the US starts more small wars, it starts fewer big wars, and most people killed in war are killed in big wars. Europe has started fewer wars and killed fewer people since 1945 than the US has, and this is a sign that Europe is safer for the average resident or neighbor than the US is, but that sign is more than cancelled out by Europe's record (and Japan's record) before 1945. Over the centuries, most prolonged rivalries and most expensive arms races between European nations ended in a war. In contrast, the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race between the US and the USSR did not end in a war -- at least not a war in which the most lethal available weapons were used or in which civilians were targeted to the extent that civilians were targeted by European and Japanese governments during WW II. Surely, the USSR's government deserves some of the credit for that surprisingly good outcome, but so does the US government. And if you want to claim that the US did not have to participate in the intense prolonged rivalry and extremely expensive arms race -- if you want to argue that the fact that it did is a sign that the US is badly governed, you have to face the fact that if it had not participated, all of Europe would've been overrun by the USSR. There was far less political will in Western Europe to prepare for yet another war than would've been necessary to resist an invasion from the USSR if the US hadn't paid for most of the preparations. I do not conclude from this analysis that the US government is better than most governments -- only that it is not clear to me that it is definitely worse. And I think it is a mistake to draw a boundary at 1945 and claim that anything that happened before then was too long ago to have any bearing on the question of which of today's governments are better.

skookumchuck 8y ago

It is the greatest country in the world, despite its problems. For example, since 2016, CNN has been attempting to destroy the Trump Presidency 24/7, without any of their reporters being harassed, disappeared, imprisoned, dying in mysterious accidents, etc. It takes a great country for that to happen.

icelancer 8y ago

>> If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. People in America are not generally ready to accept the immigration policies of Western Europe, nor do we have the luxury of a military power that we can free-ride off of. Your comparison is simplistic and wrong.

rayiner 8y ago

The older I get, the more I suspect that the problem isn’t our system, but Americans. Take something like the NYC subway. It’s a disaster while London’s Tube works fine. The usual excuses (not enough money) don’t work—the NYC metro has double the operating costs per passenger trip, even though the systems are very similar. Maybe Americans just aren’t very good at government. This is not so crazy a concept. When I was in Tokyo I marveled at how people would walk several blocks to get to a cross walk. Here in DC, people jay walk like it’s going out of style. That’s when it hit me that it’s no surprise Metro is a disaster while Tokyo’s trains work great.

microcolonel 8y ago
I think a major problem with it is apathy, which is abundant, and can explain most ways government works worse in America (and why there should be less of it). Granted, I still don't agree that things are oh-so-bad in the U.S. Every time we bring up an issue, the Americans and foreigners alike gasp and point fingers, but this sort of stuff happens all over the world, just maybe not this exact problem in other English speaking nations. What this does show is that we shouldn't expect government approaches which at least somewhat function in other countries to work well in the U.S.
dfraser992 8y ago
I'm American, but I live in the UK and am currently working on a research project for Network Rail to investigate how machine learning might be used to improve performance. So I've been reading up on rail networks in general. The Tube is mostly great, but there are issues; the public generally doesn't see them (but I guess you've never been in London at rush hour?). The UK rail network however is a disaster. Privatization has made things worse - organizational chaos because of too many overlapping responsibilities between all the companies / not enough coordination. And the profit motive of course screws up things for what ought to be treated as a public utility. The latest disaster (the re-timetabling of GTR's services) was badly planned, managed, and executed. It's not "government" in general - my opinion is Americans in general are a lot more organized than the British in a fundamental sense. Europe is one a model of exactly how to run things - but at a certain cost to passengers. There is enough buffer space left in the timetable to deal with possible delays or problems, and so services are relatively infrequent, but on the whole punctual. Thus passengers have to adjust their lives for that. The UK however does not do that - buffer space is eaten up to stick freight trains in whenever possible and any issues with them (plus issues with passenger trains) cascade. And UK passengers have always had train services available at the drop of a hat (metaphorically) - the social cost to move over to the EU style of doing things would make a lot of people very unhappy. The GTR disaster is an example of how socially disruptive changes are, especially when badly managed. Japan is of course super organized, so they have train services down to the very second. The UK only labels trains as 'late' if they arrive more than 3 minutes late... As for NYC, yeah, they have a lot of issues. Old tracks, underfunded, but mostly bad management decisions in trying to solve one problem and it snowballs - the NY Times have had some good articles on exactly what is going wrong. It is like no one has been paying attention to all the OR research in this area, but that seems to be normal - the gap between theory and what's actually is done in industry is quite large.