Its easy to say "just build trains." It is much harder to actually do it. New rail costs on the order of a billion dollars a mile in American cities. It is not financially practical to expand rail service because of this. What usually ends up happening when suburban areas densify is just that traffic gets worse. It makes sense that people are worried about that when theyve seen it happen many times.
I don't really care about how much it costs to make America look like a modern, 21st century place like the rest of the developed world. Americans deserve to live in a place that gives them services like the rest of the world has.
Deploy the army Corp of engineers, tie to a massive jobs program with expedited eminent domain. Fund it by closing loopholes on wealthy tax cheats, tax unrealized gains for billionaires, tax loans against stocks, tax private jet travel 100%. And on and on.
These are all solvable problems but no one has the will because the people empowered are too fucking comfortable watching the planet get destroyed while people die deaths of exposure and despair by the millions.
When you say "just bring in the army corps of engineers" everyone hears "we're not going to solve the problem" because the odds of that happening are extremely low compared to the odds of everyone just putting up with things being a little bit worse. We need to rebuild faith in our government in order to undertake projects that cause change.
