The US does not have a rail and wider public transportation culture that is prevalent in 99% of the world. Predictably the discussion here will be preoccupied w

The US does not have a rail and wider public transportation culture that is prevalent in 99% of the world. Predictably the discussion here will be preoccupied with the kind of 'metrics' that other countries that take for granted they exist and are run for the benefit of citizens do not need to have. That is a wide ideological divide. The US seems to want to run a business for 'consumers', not a country for citizens. Part of this culture has leaked to some countries via the classic neoliberalism playbook of demonizing government services and public infrastructure, defund, create chaos and sing the praise of privatization to transfer resources and business to the private sector. All these experiments have failed miserably to deliver better services, promised efficiency or costs savings. Notice the absence of economic studies and wider dissemination of these failures compared to the ever flowing 'economic studies' demonizing public services and government. No one to fund it. On the other hand public spends that benefit business like subsidies, bailouts, a wildly excessive military industrial complex do not generate the same ideological fervour. Think tanks, economists and the business press do not talk about inefficiency and size of the public workforce when it comes to the agricultural subsidies regime, bank bailouts, corporate freebies, the massive security state and endless wars and its attendant inefficiencies in the pentagon, NSA, TSA, in this case its 'grin and bear it'. Why does the NSA need to spy on everyone, how much is it spending, how many workers does it employ? How much does the TSA cost? Lament but make no changes. This is not how a democracy works.