Eh I don’t totally buy that. While in theory it would be nice if trains and the like were a purely public good, every transit agency in the USA has consistently

Eh I don’t totally buy that. While in theory it would be nice if trains and the like were a purely public good, every transit agency in the USA has consistently failed to deliver. Most of the Asian train systems aside from the Chinese ones - Hong Kong MTR, the privatized Japanese lines and so on - tend to be private companies which, unlike the US systems, derive their profits not from the train lines themselves but buy building giant shopping/apartment/office complexes on top of stations, which makes a ton of sense - people ride a train to go some where, so make the train stations be the places they want to go to, and you will be heavily incentivized to make your trains very efficient at moving people. The Japanese system under JR originally was a national one but it ultimately got a lot more efficient after privatization, not before. I think that the incentive structures in the US are super messed up, and while it may be possible for the government to operate systems effectively I don’t see a politically viable way to unravel those messed up incentives.