China is an authoritarian state, so they can do any number of things that are strategic without worrying about popularity. In the US, at the federal level at l

China is an authoritarian state, so they can do any number of things that are strategic without worrying about popularity. In the US, at the federal level at least, rail has a serious popularity problem which makes it politically difficult to sustain. That problem is largely driven by the fact that outside of the northeast our rail service is a joke. If we want to have good quality rail across the country — which I would like to have, fwiw — I think we’d get there faster by focusing on serving just a few places with very high quality rail that everyone else would actually want. Then we could gradually expand the system with concentrated investments that hit that quality bar. After a generation of that, we could have broadly popular rail with a high quality of service. Perhaps that could even include highly subsidized service to rural areas, in the same way we have intensely subsidized highway and postal services to such places today. But I think if we want to get there we need to start with a smaller goal of regional networks that are GOOD, so that people’s perception of rail changes.