THE PROBLEM WITH U.S. PASSENGER RAIL: “The fantasy for passenger rail advocates is Europe. But in reality the fantasy does not even exist. In much more densely populated Europe with large government subsidies for passenger rail and other mass transit cars still account for most miles traveled. . . . Many passenger rail advocates are uninterested in trade-offs between different ways to spend taxpayer dollars. The cognitive deficiencies that lead them to their way of looking at things are probably not tractable without decades more of advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology. But there’s another approach that might work with a subset of them: passenger rail’s role as an energy saver is far from clear.”