13 ms·

The United States needs to learn how to learn

143 points by ruddct 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago
I’m not convinced that bringing in European managers will solve the distances between cities, the fact that the rails and right-of-ways are almost entirely privately owned, and the fact that Americans are generally comfortable with an auto and airplane model of transportation. I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great. I also don’t see a reasonable path that is “we need better managers” but instead “we either need to pour gigantic piles of money into buying railroads, which is either an eminent domain taking or a massive giveaway to freight companies who own the rails now, only to find that no one wants to spend every bit of a whole damn day getting from Boston to Las Vegas and so will fly anyway.”
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Andy Byford by most accounts did a great job in NYC....until Cuomo got jealous and forced him out. This was a nice anecdote that hiring actually-knowledgeable outsiders (not private sector dilettantes) can help.
  - cguess 5y ago
    It's funny how here in NYC he was literally nicknamed "train daddy" and radically improved the subway on-time rates and track speeds... so yep, he had to go. Everyone loved him, NY and London are not all that different culturally. He picked up on the subtleties and worked through them, and goddamn I wish we could have him back.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wbl 5y ago
  The Northeast is dense. Bay Area should have German levels of S-Bahn style service on the UP tracks.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    Is there anywhere else that is dense enough to connect besides the bay, la, andnthe dc to boston strip? Thats probably getting close to a quarter of the population so even that would be a good deal. A lot of smaller cities could use better bus systems, but they take hours to get anyi with all the stops amd switchovers.
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      The southeast US is not as dense as the northeast, but TN, NC, SC, GA, AL, and FL have 55 million or so people in them, the majority living in or near major metro areas. Connecting those major metros using the existing interstate corridors as the general path, you'd get most of the remaining population within a short distance of this intercity railway. If the metros themselves invested in better intrametro (I'd say intracity, but it would be a misnomer) transit systems that connected to the intercity system it could be effective for the region.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      The Midwest region (centered on Chicago) is very much within viable HSR range--as I point out in a nearby comment, it actually contains larger cities within the same general distance as the French TGV network. Texas triangle would also be a viable region. As my sibling comment points out, southeast US is marginally viable. The Pacific Northwest (Portland-Vancouver) is also on the margin of viability. The other parts of the northeast--Boston-Toronto and NYC-Montreal--are very definitely viable HSR routes. You might find some more strap-on routes to the main Northeast Corridor that I haven't included (Scranton, maybe?), simply because the NEC is such a phenomenally powerful generator of traffic. Connecting the Midwest to the Northeast and the Southeast may also be viable, but again it's somewhat more marginal because the big city in the Midwest is on the wrong side of the region.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  I'd gladly sit in a nice train compartment for a day over driving or flying, especially if it had a nice view.
  - plandis 5y ago
    I certainly wouldn’t, and I’m willing to bet people like me are in the majority. Why waste a day in a train when I can drive for way less cost and stop wherever I please or fly and get there much faster? Not to mention that if I drive some place Im not worried about transportation locally which would, in most places in the US, require renting a car or paying for ride shares.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      So you'll rather drive and do nothing else vs sitting in a train with a full restaurant with a bar, comfy chairs, wi-fi and a quiet spot for working[1][2]? I've done multiple 3 hour train trips this way, I'll NEVER choose driving over it. I can sit down and order food from downstairs, it'll be brought to my seat. I've got a quiet spot to work in with an 230V outlet and working Wifi. I can do billable work every minute I'm in the train. I can even close my eyes and take a nap. Compare this to driving, which would take an hour longer, I'd need to be 100% focused on the road all the time, I can't bill my hours, I can't relax. [1] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/working-on-the-train https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/working-on-the-... [2] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/upstairs-of-the-restaurant-car https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/upstairs-of-the...
      - R0b0t1 5y ago
        If you're not billing your transit time you're making a mistake. I've heard of people double billing plane or train transit: one customer put you on the train, and the other customer pays for the work you do on the train.
        theshrike79 5y ago
        Yep, this was the exact case. I can't bill transit from all clients, but I can still do billable work on the train for other clients. No way to do that while driving.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > I’m not convinced that bringing in European managers will solve the distances between cities, Except that the US isn't all that less dense than Europe. There's a great belt of land that approximately no one lives in, between the west coast and the Mississippi River. High-speed rail will never be cost-effective connecting anything across that region, and no one is seriously proposing such a thing. Take it out, and concentrate on the rest of the country, in regions where there are cities close each other and the numbers make more sense. The Midwest, for example. Chicago-Minneapolis is 350 mi, Chicago-Cleveland 300 mi, and Chicago-St Louis and Chicago-Detroit each 250 mi. Paris-Lyon is 250 mi, Paris-Bordeaux 300 mi, and Paris-Marseille 400mi. As for population, all of these cities are larger than their French counterparts (the smallest, Cleveland is only a ~2m MSA, whereas the largest non-Paris French city is about a ~2.3m MSA). If HSR is tenable in France, then why would the distances in the Midwest make it untenable?
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Yep, with proper high-speed rail one could travel from Minneapolis to Chicago in under two hours. Without the airport security theater, with proper in-car restaurants and remote working facilities. Who wouldn't take that offer?
- bsder 5y ago
  > I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great. I'm going to counterargument this. Certain rail corridors are great--Naples to Rome, for example, was wonderful. But somehow when we were visiting Europe, we often found that air actually did better in both price and time. The cheap rail fares often require quite a bit further advance purchase than air fares. This strikes me as ... odd.
nicklecompte 5y ago
I don’t necessarily disagree with the gist of this post but there was one minor comment I found odd. It might just be my ignorance (I am not a transit person and have always been bad at algebraic geometry): > Amtrak can and should fully replace its senior management with people who know how to run a modern intercity railroads, who are not Americans. But then middle management will still think it knows better and refuse to learn what a tropical algebra is or how it is significant for rail schedule planning. Are transit middle-managers in Europe really applying tropical algebra to rail problems? My understanding is that the mathematical field of tropical algebra didn’t really exist until the 80s, and the research application to control theory is a 2010-era development. It strikes me as very strange to expect anyone who isn’t a PhD in math or operations research to even understand the algebraic geometry required, let alone apply it to a real problem. But I suppose 30 years ago people would have said the same thing about linear programming. So maybe I am behind the times.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Per your quote they're lamenting the (apparent) refusal to learn what it is, not master it or how to apply it. This is a perennial management problem (well, a perennial organizational problem, but exacerbated when it's the managers). I've worked in offices that were absolutely convinced source code version control meant handing off a file or document to a person who kept the diffs and everything in sync, perhaps with their exclusive use of (often) some 80s or 90s version control system that no one else was allowed to directly access. I didn't need the managers to learn git (in the sense of being able to use it) but I did need them to learn that there were much better ways than the absolutely dysfunctional approaches they were preferring (due to familiarity).
  - spekcular 5y ago
    Why would a rail manager learn (about) something that has no practical utility and requires a massive investment of effort (graduate mathematical training)?
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
petermcneeley 5y ago
This is a modest proposal to replace some Americans (senior managers of Amtrack) with other better future Americans from europe. Then we have a stronger modest proposal "This percolates down to planners and line workers, and I don’t think Americans are ready for a conversation about full workforce replacement at underperforming agencies." What is missing is the proposal to replace All Americans with better future Americans. Perhaps thats the next post.
juegos 5y ago
I recall as a kid being told our European counterpart's curricula focused on teaching people how to "learn" -- critical thinking etc. from an early age, and remember thinking how that made sense, and wish I was taught that as a kid. I think the root of this problem stems from the structure of us American's educational system.
- imoverclocked 5y ago
  There are things that any school system excels at more than others. My Bulgarian ex-wife was really good (in comparison to myself and others we met) with trig identities. Math seemed to be strongly emphasized in her youth but that didn’t necessarily impart good overall judgement. Critical thinking is a core skill that needs to be nurtured for sure. However, critical thinking is useless without basic facts… which means there needs to be some emphasis on wrote memorization. Sometimes those two things can feel at odds; Why memorize anything when it can just be derived? In a country that simultaneously fights over reciting a pledge because it has “under God” while also fighting against teaching evolution, it’s pretty amazing that we function at all.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  Which European counterpart? Europe is extremely multicultural. Speaking as someone who went through French school... nope, it's a brutal hellscape where they try to fit you in tidy little boxes and what they teach you is decided on the basis of how easy it is to grade, just like everywhere else. Though multiple-choice question tests are a lot less common than in the US, I think. I wish everyone just did Montessori or something similar.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Not only that, IIRC ( never went through it), France has a popular test format with multiple choice questions, QCM, which penalises you for mistakes ( as in points are actively deducted for every wrong answer instead of just not given), which is IMHO terrible because it encourages memorisation and zero thought.
    - 5y ago
tims33 5y ago
There is no doubt that America needs to get much better at rail and other mass transit and that there is a lot to be learned from the rest of the world. The challenge is that America is not Europe in many ways, but particularly in geography. And yet there is a certain condescension that America has to do it like Europe. That is a message that will never be well received delivered in that way.
- macintux 5y ago
  People must be reading a different piece than I am. Where does the author say we have to do it like Europe does?!
  - tims33 5y ago
    "Amtrak can and should fully replace its senior management with people who know how to run a modern intercity railroads, who are not Americans" The entirety of the article is a set of comparisons to European countries with 2 references to Japan thrown in.
    - macintux 5y ago
      Which is still not the same as saying we have to do it their way, but that people who have done it successfully might be able to do it again. I agree that sentence is too strongly worded, but hell it might be entirely correct.
      - kodah 5y ago
        I understood this point, but honestly the author's writing style is fairly combative for a piece that is responding to absolutely no one. Generally when I've said, "We should do x like y, because they do it better" I figured out that people are often off-put by this because it's been used in reductionist ways to avoid having to answer very we-centric problems.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      If the reading comprehension ITT is typical of Americans, TFA may well be correct.
giantg2 5y ago
The thing that's missing is that there's no incentive to learn. Will doing a better job make for better pay? Will people actually believe in and use an improved system? Will the government adequately fund the system? At least the other systems have a history of performance, leading to worker pride. Like just about everything else in the US, the Amtrak workers are basically corporate drones who have been stripped of their craftsman pride.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Europeans just don't know how to make money. We should ship some of our best Americans to Europe, replace their senior leadership and show them how to learn, and then migrate their capital to the United States, where it rightfully belongs.
- warent 5y ago
  I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but many Scandinavian countries have apparently learned how to make enough money to provide some of the best public resources in the world, that make the USA look like a developing country
  - hnnnnnnng 5y ago
    Yeah by drilling oil wells and directing all the profits to the government. hahaa
    - foobarian 5y ago
      To be fair that was an Iraqi immigrant's idea.
    - astrange 5y ago
      That's only one of them. Sweden instead seems to be good at running clothing and furniture brands.
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
        No, Sweden is a basket case. Ikea's headquarters is actually in the Netherlands, and they use Lichtenstein for tax avoidance. Sweden already had one social welfare reset due to spiralling cots, and are on their second wave now. Because of uncontrolled economic migration, they will need another reset. Folks, socialism just doesn't work.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago
dumpsterdiver 5y ago
Dense and incompetent writing can only fool so many people. Some will be bullied by incomprehensible prose, but others will call you out on your complete lack of form. I call bad form. Speak clearly, and stop with the bullshit.
- dumpsterdiver 5y ago
  I was really surprised when I got upvoted briefly because I knew this would be a contentious comment. Now I'm back down, and that's what I expected. I don't apologize.
danschumann 5y ago
Technology is toolmaking
cletus 5y ago
It's actually worse than that: it's not that the US doesn't know how to learn (from others), it's the US increasingly takes pride in its own ignorance. I remember a friend years ago telling about the rise of anti-intellectualism in the US. I said he was wrong. Boy was I way off. Stephen Colbert in 2005 was disturbingly prescient with this [1]. As for anything regarding public transit (intercity or intracity) in the US, sadly I think it's pretty much a lost cause. People just don't want it. They want their 1-2 acre lots within a city (which I still find crazy) and their cars. The US is more than twice the land area of the EU. The EU has people concentrated in fewer cities (just look at how many airports and flights there are between the two). Barring some historical exceptions in the Northeast, American cities are generally much less dense. All these factors work against public transit. It's not impossible but it's harder. As for Amtrak... it's pretty much a victim of a fairly disastrous nationalization. Amtrak shares the lines with freight that can often delay it. Just having the track and the rights-of-way doesn't mean it's easy or cheap to upgrade or replace it for high-speed rail. There's lots of opposition to this for of public infrastructure spending. And so on. [1]: https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-truthiness https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-...
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The US should focus on expanding existing commuter service and adding missing routes near higher density populations. I live hundreds of miles from a prospective endpoint of a massively expanded Amtrak, in a region about the size of the Netherlands, with 1/50th the population. There's not even a reasonable comparison to be made.
  - yardie 5y ago
    Unfortunately, the money has to come from the national budget. Which means every state gets their say in how it’s spent. So yes, a commuter rail linking east coast cities makes sense. Now, get 17-19 Midwestern states to approve it as well. And that’s where you have the problem. It’s not what makes financial sense, it’s about how can I maximise this politically.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Americans know how to learn. They're in general great at it! Federal US agencies OTOH, only know how to keep existing. They're also very good at that.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> This percolates down to planners and line workers, and I don’t think Americans are ready for a conversation about full workforce replacement at underperforming agencies. Why is the same logic not leveled against other institutions, like teacher's unions? Their tenure-based worker protections, unwillingness to be measured on performance, and other negative behavior is exactly what deserves a full workplace replacement. American K-12 schools are funded exorbitantly but the quality of education is absolutely terrible.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
European and Asian public transport planning can't be imported to America without the urban zoning needed to support the necessary density to make such networks economically viable. Its not viable to just import EU and Asian transportation planning here ... it doesn't work because we lack density. I would be happy enough to fund the transport networks before the density exists, as long as the zoning allows density, as the density would follow as a natural course once the transportation links are established. But that can't happen if the local regulations forbid density. So this author is completely clueless. Uber is engaged in making transportation more efficient in an environment where we have screwed ourselves. The public planners have no choice but to figure out how to do microtransport, because we lack the density. Anyone who doesn't understand this is completely clueless, and demonizing Uber is popular, but ultimately idiotic. I'm a big fan of trains and I think Uber is a dead end evolution. But America needs to identify the right cause of our problems. Its not Uber.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Uber is engaged in making transportation more efficient in an environment where we have screwed ourselves Is it? There isn't anything efficient about an Uber. They might be easier than a taxi in some cases due to their app UX, but that's about it - they're very inefficient in ecological and congestion terms.
- bluGill 5y ago
  In Sweden there are farms with transit. (My wife was an exchange student there ). Suburbs are dense enough for a bus every 10 minutes, but it takes effort to get there for long enough for people to realize the bus is useful and prove you were right to run it.
m0llusk 5y ago
Speaking of learning from other countries, the US should learn from Europe that high speed rail tends to replace cheap rail which serves wealthy customers while locking out others. The current plan to move forward with rail should tap into experience while avoiding groupthink.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  Not at all what I noticed. Everywhere I can go with a fast train (expensive) I can go with a slow train aswell, for far less money.

143 points by ruddct 5y ago

I’m not convinced that bringing in European managers will solve the distances between cities, the fact that the rails and right-of-ways are almost entirely privately owned, and the fact that Americans are generally comfortable with an auto and airplane model of transportation. I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great. I also don’t see a reasonable path that is “we need better managers” but instead “we either need to pour gigantic piles of money into buying railroads, which is either an eminent domain taking or a massive giveaway to freight companies who own the rails now, only to find that no one wants to spend every bit of a whole damn day getting from Boston to Las Vegas and so will fly anyway.”

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Ericson2314 5y ago
Andy Byford by most accounts did a great job in NYC....until Cuomo got jealous and forced him out. This was a nice anecdote that hiring actually-knowledgeable outsiders (not private sector dilettantes) can help.
- cguess 5y ago
  It's funny how here in NYC he was literally nicknamed "train daddy" and radically improved the subway on-time rates and track speeds... so yep, he had to go. Everyone loved him, NY and London are not all that different culturally. He picked up on the subtleties and worked through them, and goddamn I wish we could have him back.
deleted 5y ago
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wbl 5y ago
The Northeast is dense. Bay Area should have German levels of S-Bahn style service on the UP tracks.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  Is there anywhere else that is dense enough to connect besides the bay, la, andnthe dc to boston strip? Thats probably getting close to a quarter of the population so even that would be a good deal. A lot of smaller cities could use better bus systems, but they take hours to get anyi with all the stops amd switchovers.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    The southeast US is not as dense as the northeast, but TN, NC, SC, GA, AL, and FL have 55 million or so people in them, the majority living in or near major metro areas. Connecting those major metros using the existing interstate corridors as the general path, you'd get most of the remaining population within a short distance of this intercity railway. If the metros themselves invested in better intrametro (I'd say intracity, but it would be a misnomer) transit systems that connected to the intercity system it could be effective for the region.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    The Midwest region (centered on Chicago) is very much within viable HSR range--as I point out in a nearby comment, it actually contains larger cities within the same general distance as the French TGV network. Texas triangle would also be a viable region. As my sibling comment points out, southeast US is marginally viable. The Pacific Northwest (Portland-Vancouver) is also on the margin of viability. The other parts of the northeast--Boston-Toronto and NYC-Montreal--are very definitely viable HSR routes. You might find some more strap-on routes to the main Northeast Corridor that I haven't included (Scranton, maybe?), simply because the NEC is such a phenomenally powerful generator of traffic. Connecting the Midwest to the Northeast and the Southeast may also be viable, but again it's somewhat more marginal because the big city in the Midwest is on the wrong side of the region.
jimmaswell 5y ago
I'd gladly sit in a nice train compartment for a day over driving or flying, especially if it had a nice view.
- plandis 5y ago
  I certainly wouldn’t, and I’m willing to bet people like me are in the majority. Why waste a day in a train when I can drive for way less cost and stop wherever I please or fly and get there much faster? Not to mention that if I drive some place Im not worried about transportation locally which would, in most places in the US, require renting a car or paying for ride shares.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    So you'll rather drive and do nothing else vs sitting in a train with a full restaurant with a bar, comfy chairs, wi-fi and a quiet spot for working[1][2]? I've done multiple 3 hour train trips this way, I'll NEVER choose driving over it. I can sit down and order food from downstairs, it'll be brought to my seat. I've got a quiet spot to work in with an 230V outlet and working Wifi. I can do billable work every minute I'm in the train. I can even close my eyes and take a nap. Compare this to driving, which would take an hour longer, I'd need to be 100% focused on the road all the time, I can't bill my hours, I can't relax. [1] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/working-on-the-train https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/working-on-the-... [2] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/upstairs-of-the-restaurant-car https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/upstairs-of-the...
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      If you're not billing your transit time you're making a mistake. I've heard of people double billing plane or train transit: one customer put you on the train, and the other customer pays for the work you do on the train.
      - theshrike79 5y ago
        Yep, this was the exact case. I can't bill transit from all clients, but I can still do billable work on the train for other clients. No way to do that while driving.
jcranmer 5y ago
> I’m not convinced that bringing in European managers will solve the distances between cities, Except that the US isn't all that less dense than Europe. There's a great belt of land that approximately no one lives in, between the west coast and the Mississippi River. High-speed rail will never be cost-effective connecting anything across that region, and no one is seriously proposing such a thing. Take it out, and concentrate on the rest of the country, in regions where there are cities close each other and the numbers make more sense. The Midwest, for example. Chicago-Minneapolis is 350 mi, Chicago-Cleveland 300 mi, and Chicago-St Louis and Chicago-Detroit each 250 mi. Paris-Lyon is 250 mi, Paris-Bordeaux 300 mi, and Paris-Marseille 400mi. As for population, all of these cities are larger than their French counterparts (the smallest, Cleveland is only a ~2m MSA, whereas the largest non-Paris French city is about a ~2.3m MSA). If HSR is tenable in France, then why would the distances in the Midwest make it untenable?
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Yep, with proper high-speed rail one could travel from Minneapolis to Chicago in under two hours. Without the airport security theater, with proper in-car restaurants and remote working facilities. Who wouldn't take that offer?
bsder 5y ago
> I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great. I'm going to counterargument this. Certain rail corridors are great--Naples to Rome, for example, was wonderful. But somehow when we were visiting Europe, we often found that air actually did better in both price and time. The cheap rail fares often require quite a bit further advance purchase than air fares. This strikes me as ... odd.

nicklecompte 5y ago

I don’t necessarily disagree with the gist of this post but there was one minor comment I found odd. It might just be my ignorance (I am not a transit person and have always been bad at algebraic geometry): > Amtrak can and should fully replace its senior management with people who know how to run a modern intercity railroads, who are not Americans. But then middle management will still think it knows better and refuse to learn what a tropical algebra is or how it is significant for rail schedule planning. Are transit middle-managers in Europe really applying tropical algebra to rail problems? My understanding is that the mathematical field of tropical algebra didn’t really exist until the 80s, and the research application to control theory is a 2010-era development. It strikes me as very strange to expect anyone who isn’t a PhD in math or operations research to even understand the algebraic geometry required, let alone apply it to a real problem. But I suppose 30 years ago people would have said the same thing about linear programming. So maybe I am behind the times.

Jtsummers 5y ago
Per your quote they're lamenting the (apparent) refusal to learn what it is, not master it or how to apply it. This is a perennial management problem (well, a perennial organizational problem, but exacerbated when it's the managers). I've worked in offices that were absolutely convinced source code version control meant handing off a file or document to a person who kept the diffs and everything in sync, perhaps with their exclusive use of (often) some 80s or 90s version control system that no one else was allowed to directly access. I didn't need the managers to learn git (in the sense of being able to use it) but I did need them to learn that there were much better ways than the absolutely dysfunctional approaches they were preferring (due to familiarity).
- spekcular 5y ago
  Why would a rail manager learn (about) something that has no practical utility and requires a massive investment of effort (graduate mathematical training)?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago

petermcneeley 5y ago

This is a modest proposal to replace some Americans (senior managers of Amtrack) with other better future Americans from europe. Then we have a stronger modest proposal "This percolates down to planners and line workers, and I don’t think Americans are ready for a conversation about full workforce replacement at underperforming agencies." What is missing is the proposal to replace All Americans with better future Americans. Perhaps thats the next post.

juegos 5y ago

I recall as a kid being told our European counterpart's curricula focused on teaching people how to "learn" -- critical thinking etc. from an early age, and remember thinking how that made sense, and wish I was taught that as a kid. I think the root of this problem stems from the structure of us American's educational system.

imoverclocked 5y ago
There are things that any school system excels at more than others. My Bulgarian ex-wife was really good (in comparison to myself and others we met) with trig identities. Math seemed to be strongly emphasized in her youth but that didn’t necessarily impart good overall judgement. Critical thinking is a core skill that needs to be nurtured for sure. However, critical thinking is useless without basic facts… which means there needs to be some emphasis on wrote memorization. Sometimes those two things can feel at odds; Why memorize anything when it can just be derived? In a country that simultaneously fights over reciting a pledge because it has “under God” while also fighting against teaching evolution, it’s pretty amazing that we function at all.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
Which European counterpart? Europe is extremely multicultural. Speaking as someone who went through French school... nope, it's a brutal hellscape where they try to fit you in tidy little boxes and what they teach you is decided on the basis of how easy it is to grade, just like everywhere else. Though multiple-choice question tests are a lot less common than in the US, I think. I wish everyone just did Montessori or something similar.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Not only that, IIRC ( never went through it), France has a popular test format with multiple choice questions, QCM, which penalises you for mistakes ( as in points are actively deducted for every wrong answer instead of just not given), which is IMHO terrible because it encourages memorisation and zero thought.
  - 5y ago

tims33 5y ago

There is no doubt that America needs to get much better at rail and other mass transit and that there is a lot to be learned from the rest of the world. The challenge is that America is not Europe in many ways, but particularly in geography. And yet there is a certain condescension that America has to do it like Europe. That is a message that will never be well received delivered in that way.

macintux 5y ago
People must be reading a different piece than I am. Where does the author say we have to do it like Europe does?!
- tims33 5y ago
  "Amtrak can and should fully replace its senior management with people who know how to run a modern intercity railroads, who are not Americans" The entirety of the article is a set of comparisons to European countries with 2 references to Japan thrown in.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Which is still not the same as saying we have to do it their way, but that people who have done it successfully might be able to do it again. I agree that sentence is too strongly worded, but hell it might be entirely correct.
    - kodah 5y ago
      I understood this point, but honestly the author's writing style is fairly combative for a piece that is responding to absolutely no one. Generally when I've said, "We should do x like y, because they do it better" I figured out that people are often off-put by this because it's been used in reductionist ways to avoid having to answer very we-centric problems.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    If the reading comprehension ITT is typical of Americans, TFA may well be correct.

giantg2 5y ago

The thing that's missing is that there's no incentive to learn. Will doing a better job make for better pay? Will people actually believe in and use an improved system? Will the government adequately fund the system? At least the other systems have a history of performance, leading to worker pride. Like just about everything else in the US, the Amtrak workers are basically corporate drones who have been stripped of their craftsman pride.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Europeans just don't know how to make money. We should ship some of our best Americans to Europe, replace their senior leadership and show them how to learn, and then migrate their capital to the United States, where it rightfully belongs.

warent 5y ago
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but many Scandinavian countries have apparently learned how to make enough money to provide some of the best public resources in the world, that make the USA look like a developing country
- hnnnnnnng 5y ago
  Yeah by drilling oil wells and directing all the profits to the government. hahaa
  - foobarian 5y ago
    To be fair that was an Iraqi immigrant's idea.
  - astrange 5y ago
    That's only one of them. Sweden instead seems to be good at running clothing and furniture brands.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      No, Sweden is a basket case. Ikea's headquarters is actually in the Netherlands, and they use Lichtenstein for tax avoidance. Sweden already had one social welfare reset due to spiralling cots, and are on their second wave now. Because of uncontrolled economic migration, they will need another reset. Folks, socialism just doesn't work.
- deleted 5y ago
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dumpsterdiver 5y ago

Dense and incompetent writing can only fool so many people. Some will be bullied by incomprehensible prose, but others will call you out on your complete lack of form. I call bad form. Speak clearly, and stop with the bullshit.

dumpsterdiver 5y ago
I was really surprised when I got upvoted briefly because I knew this would be a contentious comment. Now I'm back down, and that's what I expected. I don't apologize.

danschumann 5y ago

Technology is toolmaking

cletus 5y ago

It's actually worse than that: it's not that the US doesn't know how to learn (from others), it's the US increasingly takes pride in its own ignorance. I remember a friend years ago telling about the rise of anti-intellectualism in the US. I said he was wrong. Boy was I way off. Stephen Colbert in 2005 was disturbingly prescient with this [1]. As for anything regarding public transit (intercity or intracity) in the US, sadly I think it's pretty much a lost cause. People just don't want it. They want their 1-2 acre lots within a city (which I still find crazy) and their cars. The US is more than twice the land area of the EU. The EU has people concentrated in fewer cities (just look at how many airports and flights there are between the two). Barring some historical exceptions in the Northeast, American cities are generally much less dense. All these factors work against public transit. It's not impossible but it's harder. As for Amtrak... it's pretty much a victim of a fairly disastrous nationalization. Amtrak shares the lines with freight that can often delay it. Just having the track and the rights-of-way doesn't mean it's easy or cheap to upgrade or replace it for high-speed rail. There's lots of opposition to this for of public infrastructure spending. And so on. [1]: https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-truthiness https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-...

maxerickson 5y ago
The US should focus on expanding existing commuter service and adding missing routes near higher density populations. I live hundreds of miles from a prospective endpoint of a massively expanded Amtrak, in a region about the size of the Netherlands, with 1/50th the population. There's not even a reasonable comparison to be made.
- yardie 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the money has to come from the national budget. Which means every state gets their say in how it’s spent. So yes, a commuter rail linking east coast cities makes sense. Now, get 17-19 Midwestern states to approve it as well. And that’s where you have the problem. It’s not what makes financial sense, it’s about how can I maximise this politically.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Americans know how to learn. They're in general great at it! Federal US agencies OTOH, only know how to keep existing. They're also very good at that.

throwawaysea 5y ago

> This percolates down to planners and line workers, and I don’t think Americans are ready for a conversation about full workforce replacement at underperforming agencies. Why is the same logic not leveled against other institutions, like teacher's unions? Their tenure-based worker protections, unwillingness to be measured on performance, and other negative behavior is exactly what deserves a full workplace replacement. American K-12 schools are funded exorbitantly but the quality of education is absolutely terrible.

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

European and Asian public transport planning can't be imported to America without the urban zoning needed to support the necessary density to make such networks economically viable. Its not viable to just import EU and Asian transportation planning here ... it doesn't work because we lack density. I would be happy enough to fund the transport networks before the density exists, as long as the zoning allows density, as the density would follow as a natural course once the transportation links are established. But that can't happen if the local regulations forbid density. So this author is completely clueless. Uber is engaged in making transportation more efficient in an environment where we have screwed ourselves. The public planners have no choice but to figure out how to do microtransport, because we lack the density. Anyone who doesn't understand this is completely clueless, and demonizing Uber is popular, but ultimately idiotic. I'm a big fan of trains and I think Uber is a dead end evolution. But America needs to identify the right cause of our problems. Its not Uber.

sofixa 5y ago
> Uber is engaged in making transportation more efficient in an environment where we have screwed ourselves Is it? There isn't anything efficient about an Uber. They might be easier than a taxi in some cases due to their app UX, but that's about it - they're very inefficient in ecological and congestion terms.
bluGill 5y ago
In Sweden there are farms with transit. (My wife was an exchange student there ). Suburbs are dense enough for a bus every 10 minutes, but it takes effort to get there for long enough for people to realize the bus is useful and prove you were right to run it.

m0llusk 5y ago

Speaking of learning from other countries, the US should learn from Europe that high speed rail tends to replace cheap rail which serves wealthy customers while locking out others. The current plan to move forward with rail should tap into experience while avoiding groupthink.

barbazoo 5y ago
Not at all what I noticed. Everywhere I can go with a fast train (expensive) I can go with a slow train aswell, for far less money.