Why Can't We Have Nice Trains?

**Andrew Heaton** (0:02)
I love trains, and not just because I'm probably on the autism spectrum. They are my favorite form of transit. I find that when I drive a car, it's much more difficult to read books or play Civilization IV on my laptop. I can do that when I fly on one of those airplane things, but they're horribly cramped. You can get up to go to the bathroom, but you can't really stretch your legs, and they get mad when you try to talk to the pilot. You can't meander to the meal car.
I particularly love sleeper trains. I'm one of those guys who always feels vaguely guilty if I'm not working, and that horrible constant work ethic only quiets under three circumstances. When I'm drunk, when I'm camping, or sleeper trains. Because on a sleeper train, I look out the window and think, well, I'm going 65 miles an hour in a foreign country. Isn't that enough? Can't I just read a paperback and relax?
So why doesn't America have nice trains? In general, why do we have such shoddy transit systems? Now, a lot of people might say, because that stuff is frivolous European socialism. We shouldn't be spending good tax dollars on that. Fine, but keep in mind that the government builds roads and highways. We're using tax dollars for that form of transit. So using that logic, we have car socialism, but we don't have train socialism. Even so, as we will learn today, it's not even primarily a funding issue. It's not that we could spend money on trains, but that we don't.
You know this person, right? There's a particular archetype in our culture who maybe did his study abroad in Europe as a sophomore and now believes deep down they are a displaced Parisian who was born in South Carolina due to some kind of cosmic joke. And if we just quit being greedy and stingy and tax people and spent money on good things, we could be like our sophisticated European cousins and get nice trains. You know that? Turns out that's not it. That's not the relevant issue. It's part of it, but it's not the main thing. There's something else in terms of why we can't have nice trains. It turns out, in fact, we're really, really, really bad at how we spend transit money, like comically Rube Goldberg screwing up bad.
Why can't we have nice trains? And how do we fix it? That's today's topic right here on The Political Orphanage.
My guest today is Will Poff-Webster. He is the Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Institute for Progress, where he also works on energy, transportation and housing policy. He is a transit nerd. And we are going to talk about how to improve America's transit.

**Will Poff-Webster** (3:19)
Hello, Will. Hi, it's good to be here.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:21)
Delighted to have you. Will, kickoff question.
Why can't we have nice trains? I go to Europe sometimes. They got all these nice trains. And my friends that study broad in Europe won't shut the hell up about them. How come they get nice trains and we don't get nice trains? What's going on?

**Will Poff-Webster** (3:34)
Yeah, it's a really frustrating problem. I've had the same experience. And the short answer is it costs about three times as much to build a mile of transit in the United States as it does in low cost European or Asian countries. And we're not talking China. We're talking Italy, Spain, places that are not super different from the United States in terms of their development or economic levels.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:57)
South Korea, Japan.

**Will Poff-Webster** (3:58)
So it's just the cost of it. It costs too much.

**Andrew Heaton** (4:01)
Okay. So that answers my first question. So it's not that it's a lack of spending. It's not that we Americans are too boorish and cheap and we're obsessed with our truck nuts. And we just can't pony up the money for having proper railways like our enlightened European cousins. It's that it actually costs us prohibitively much to build the rails.
That is the initial analysis. So is that correct? And also, why are our rails more expensive?

**Will Poff-Webster** (4:29)
Yeah. I mean, interestingly enough, the main way we fund public transit in the US., there are kind of two ways and they usually go together. There are places around America where the voters vote to raise their own taxes in order pay for a public service that they want to enjoy. So in Los Angeles or in Nashville, people voted for a sales tax increase to fund better roads, better buses, new subway lines, and usually that money is paired with federal grant dollars through various federal grant programs. And so it's together. And certainly a lot of people who advocate for transit like me think we should spend more money on it, but part of what I learned doing this project is that as big a problem as not spending enough money on it is that the money we spend, we just do not spend very well.