End of the line: Transit thoughts in an uncertain America

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It feels comically small stakes to write about the state and the prospects of public transit in the United States of America in the breakneck throes of a second Donald Trump administration, at least from the besieged liberal/liberal-adjacent position that has been the intellectual harbor for pro-public transit views. But then again — what else can anyone who runs a politics and public transit Substack discuss?

My 2025 plans were to write about an interesting and complicated subway suburb outside Seoul; a 1960s tax history powering French public transit growth to this day; the regional negotiatory politics of Chinese high-speed rail; and keep the Substack humming. While this Substack has produced time-sensitive (or at least respectful of current events) posts before, the goal always was to produce amateur rail history insensitive to current events. Geographically, while this Substack previously covered U.S. rail history, I prioritized foreign histories to shed new light for the readers.

But again, what else is there to write than the state of the United States, right here, right now? I have compiled several thoughts and fleshed as far as I can stretch them. This will be a series of ideas and observations I have gestated in my head and felt compelled to write out. I have written a similar post in the past, a series of transit ideas, observations, and reflections. I hope some of them will resonate more than others with you, the reader.

Transit has never been more under attack for lesser reasons

In 2025, five years after the COVID pandemic began, all of the United States’ public transit (rail) powerhouses are still recording ridership levels lower than its pre-pandemic days. As of September 2024, WMATA in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area was crowned public transit comeback king — at about 75% of its 2019 ridership totals. Globally, transit recovery has been mixed but largely better than the U.S.’s: London Underground’s 2024 levels are about 75% of 2019 levels, but many others, such as Madrid Metro and Hong Kong MTR, long surpassed its pre-pandemic figures.

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The United States’ largest urban rail networks suffered some of the steepest ridership collapses found globally in the spring of 2020. BART in the Bay Area registered a 91% ridership decline in March 2020 alone. The harder the fall, the higher the climb, and this long climb for some systems has often been slowed due to unforeseen, often self-inflicted reasons: unwavering local work-from-home trends (BART), a temporary spike in slow speed zones across the system (MBTA), or continued cancelled trains and longer wait times (CTA), to name a few. These specific trends were coupled with a nationwide panic over urban crime and disorder, especially in public transit settings, which likely dampened mass local interests in returning back to transit.

Most, if not all, of the major urban networks (now including bus and light rail networks) in the United States were keeping the lights on with unpredecented one-time operating subsidies doled by the Biden administration. Under a new Washington, however, such amity seems fully dead. Sean Duffy, the new Secretary of Transportation, has threatened to cut federal transportation funding in “sanctuary cities” — AKA most major American cities — and tie transportation grants, partially, to the region’s marriage and birth rates in the first week of taking office.

This upswell of hostility could not come out a worse time for transit. Some of the largest and most successful public transit agencies are inching closer to the “fiscal cliff”, where the Biden-era subsidies fully run out and the future of operations funding looks unclear. Consider the agencies and their own fiscal cliff estimates:

• New York City MTA (balanced budget thru 2027)

• Washington D.C. WMATA (by 2028)

• San Francisco Bay Area BART (by FY2026)

• San Francisco Muni (by FY2026)

• Philadelphia SEPTA (by FY2025)

• Chicago CTA (by 2026)

• Seattle King County Metro (by 2028)

• Boston MBTA (by FY2025)

Falling off the fiscal cliff can mean, as Randy Clarke of WMATA said, “death by a thousand cuts or it’s death by a big sword” for the agency’s operations. Such operational collapses have happened elsewhere in the world before — but during wartimes, severe regional depopulation, or economic collapses. The United States and its biggest cities are not experiencing any of the three, and yet its transit prospects are under existential threat. And for what exactly, other than ideological differences animating enmity to brinksmanship?

Transit is only good as its gaps

In many of these metropolitan areas, local and state leaders has expressed support to prioritize transit funding and avoiding the fiscal cliff. That’s good news, but far insufficient. Truly, what these agencies need — and has always needed, for decades — is continuous, stable, and increasing investment for operations. But beggars, unfortunately, can’t be choosers, especially when facing a potential death spiral.

Why does X country have so much better transit than the United States? The lack of stable and continuous investments towards transit operation is one tidy answer to explain as a catch-all. These countries in Europe or Asia or elsewhere have invested for decades into funding their largest cities’ transit systems, or better yet, created mechanisms to self-generate sufficient funding to improve and grow. Yes, United States has indeed pumped billions into public transit over a similar timeframe — but an outsized majority goes to capital projects to build extensions, streetcar systems, or oversized stations. Operations funding is always second thought in the United States transit world. The only exception in living memory to the U.S.’s cold shoulder toward operational transit funding was just three, four years ago, when Biden pumped a one-time influx of funds to keep trains and buses running.

Operational funds are the lifeblood of public transit, and public transit is only good as its gaps. The latter statement can be applied micro and macro. For micro, let’s look at my region, the San Francisco Bay Area: with 27 systems across nine counties, it is an extremely balkanized region with its fiefdoms. But transit networks do not apply like the Holy Roman Empire; it instead works like an organic, rhizomatic ecosystem. If one of 27 systems is rendered obsolete due to funding, cuts to routes or frequencies leave gaps that cuts through the network. If it is a central node, like BART, it is fatal. Even the most peripheral gaps matter, as it kills connectivity with partner agencies and potential for ridership growth. Outstanding gaps over time recede transit from the public imagination as a reliable, trustworthy public good worth investing in.

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Like an ant colony or a root system, an ecosystem built on connectivity needs continuous expansion growth to create new permutations of connections, new journeys of travel, and new ways of mobility. As water flows downhill in the path of least of resistance, mobility seeks more mobility, and good cities encourage this. Oft-crowned public transit nirvanas, such as Paris, Madrid, or Seoul, never stop building transit stations and lines and networks in both in its well-served core areas and outer areas — to reify its ecosystem of connections, to feed the mobility monster.

The gaps theory can be applied across on a national/continental scale. Imagine: you are taking intercity transit (Amtrak/Brightline/CAHSR) from one city with a convenient transit network to another city with a deadening network. If you are compelled to rent a car or use non-transit services to get around the new city, the transit experience is harmfully over. Connectivity works not only spatially but sequentially as well. A gap in sequential connectivity may be even more harmful in that it may strongly disincentivize one from ever making the same trip, or a similar transit-oriented trip in the future.

This is why fighting for every system to not fall over the fiscal cliff will be critical.

Transit’s hidden superpowers will go unnoticed

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The paradoxical thing about transit is that despite all the infrastructural visibility — trains! buses! boats! — its most potent strengths lie hidden from plain view.

Transit shines brightest as a positive amplifier of societal benefits, such as: higher quality of living, lower economic burdens, higher property tax rolls, creation of new job markets and opportunities, reduction of health inequities, and promotion of social cohesion. These benefits are abstract fabrics which bind a modern society together. They are the magical spells that hypnotizes everyday riders into becoming its strongest advocates and champions, as they can see, for the first time, the invisible strings which transit binds to create a better society.

I have strong doubts this administration will be moved by any of these studies. I imagine if these points were brought up in effort to save transit, they will be dismissed as fake and unsubstantiated, no matter the volume of literature presented to them. To keep transit alive, new vocabulary may be desperately needed to convince it is worth investing and saving.

“Blue” state networks will pay dearly

I remember in 2019, when I worked at BART, the Federal Transit Administration under the first Trump administration withheld some $300 million in approved capital investment grants. The money was sorely needed to begin expanding train capacity between San Francisco and Oakland under the San Francisco Bay. After continuous pressure, and announcement of a “Twitter Town Hall” to rally local support, the FTA finally released the funds to BART. I remember clearly the FTA Administrator released it 15 minutes before the Twitter Town Hall was to commence.

Under the first Trump term, “blue” states on both coasts — which happen to be where the largest cities and networks are — paid undue prices from an antagonistic executive branch who delayed, disrupted, and deferred. In the second term now, we have seen it all cranked up to 11. As we have seen with Trump’s executive order to “kill’ congestion pricing in New York City, or to review the federal contracts for California High-Speed Rail (to kill it), the largest hits are targeted toward the most Democratic states: New York and California. It has only been one month, and this feels already like the most anti-transit federal administration in living memory. It would be foolish to think the hits won’t keep coming.

Anything and everything in the current political calculus can be a soft spot to attack and twist the knife, a lever to wield during hostile negotiations, a bludgeon to bash over Democratic state leaderships. For example: Trump told a Democratic governor — to her face, in person — he will withhold federal funding from her state if she does not comply with an executive order to ban transgender athletes from college sports. Transit, I believe, carry extra potency to weaponize. These urban trains and buses are not just things that move people; they are raw materials in the current political imagination-ammunition industrial complex. Trains and buses carry connotations, ideas, stereotypes, and symbolisms in the current political landscape. There is no reason to believe public transit won’t be under threat for the next four years — or at the least, wielded to punish blue leaders and blue voters in blue states for the cardinal sin of backing the wrong party and wrong color.

Elon Musk and transit

I do not want to speak too much on this due to the volatility and daily mayhem surrounding Elon Musk.

Public transit and Elon Musk have a long history of beef. Musk’s continuous promotion of his Hyperloop and covert sabotage of conventional high-speed rail projects, such as the California High-Speed Rail, soured relations between transit advocates and Musk. Transit advocates on Twitter often like to boast they were some of the first people to suss out Musk as a charlatan through this beef. And in the late 2010s, public transit agencies took occasional pot shots at Musk and his anti-transit views. I can speak from experience that it was great fun because we saw Musk as a convenient cartoon villain: harmless, easy to mock, and useful to galvanize support or just a few viral tweets.

Now, Musk is the most powerful non-elected man in the United States, using his Department of Government Efficiency cronies to pull out the federal government’s entrails in search of superlative amounts of alleged waste and fraud deep in the system. Musk also now owns Twitter. Musk has proven to be a man who holds long grudges and unafraid to rain hellfire on his foes. He is also completely unpredictable as of this publication. With enough time and due course, one has to believe the DOGE machine and Musk will line its firing cannons on public transit. One has to be ready for all possibilities in this timeline.

“Green” transit is out of step with current times

I firmly believe public transit is the best energy-efficient mode of transport for any person in the world by a country mile. It is a modern miracle that this essential technology can operate without the requirement of creating massive carbon emissions in an already warming world.

But U.S. transit’s close-knit association with green energy may be at loggerheads with the material political economy of the United States in early 2025. I do not know if Americans know the United States in 2023-2024 produced nearly 50% more oil than either petrostates Saudi Arabia or Russia via new fracking technologies; Texas alone would be the third largest oil producer in the world. As economist Adam Tooze put it in a recent podcast episode of his, the United States of current day can neatly be summed as a “self-sufficient fossil fuel/oil-based economy” whose unprecedented oil production is almost entirely to satisfy domestic consumption. Little American oil is exported. No country in the history of the world has yet such total energy dominance and independence from external forces as the United States in 2025.

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The Biden administration tried to marry industrial policy with mass-scale green energy transition to diversify the U.S. energy input and ease fossil fuel’s totalizing grip on American economy. But their gamble such policies will reap political gains, such as re-election in 2024, has failed. Now, the Trump administration has vowed unconditional support for keeping oil production at all-time highs as he rolled back Biden’s initiatives on green energy. “Drill, baby, drill” was Trump’s vow on inauguration day; where does transit fit into this new energy equation?

Symbols, Sorelian myths, and the great public safety debate

One can classify transit in so many ways: public/private; urban/rural; heavy rail/light rail/buses/ferries; and so on. But one increasingly important taxonomy of transit, and perhaps the hardest to dissect, is its various registers in the collective social imagination.

Transit is a quotidian part of modern urban life across the globe. Until recently, this was how transit was registered in the public consciousness: empirical experiences driven by the senses — how my personal experience on the train or bus was; how the experience of someone I trust was; what I saw, heard, felt, smelled; and such. But on social media online spaces, new imaginations of what “transit” is began to form and fray into something little to do with one’s daily commute. Coded in shibboleths and coated in layers of associations, “transit” took on a new definition, as a stand-in for many of the most urgent societal issues at home: crime, homelessness, urban dystopia, failure of liberalism, etc.. I’d wager now a large plurality — or majority — or Americans prescribe to this coded language.

I speak from experience, as a former BART employee who once monitored its social media channels. BART has always been a lightning rod of Bay Area discourse, especially around homelessness, policing, and crime. But I noticed a discursive change, in tone and in content, between 2019 and 2022, in the comments, the DMs, the quote retweets, the tags, and the shares. Before, the mentions were usually filled with customer complaints, requests for refunds, and vents on how awful the commute was. By 2022, the mentions were dominated by right-wing rhetoric labeling BART as the irredeemable poster child of Bay Area liberalism’s total failures and a skyrocketing increase of graphic videos of crime, gore, and human misery shared to the BART accounts. Many of these videos were years old or even not from the Bay Area. It did not matter. I remember seeing videos of men covered in blood or gaping wounds in unclear backgrounds where one cannot make out for sure if this was a BART station. The videos came in so often and so graphic I sought a therapist out of serious concern for my destabilizing mental health.

No policy topic flared this growing schism of language online more than when policing and public safety was discussed; it was as if the two sides were talking past each other. I noted then that one side — ranging politically from Bay Area socialist or communist groups to centrist technocrats — always used the language of the empirical: customer experience, societal impacts, financial impacts, etc. The other group never indulged in such details and almost exclusively spoke in images, narratives, apocalypses — in line with what writer John Ganz calls myth-making which “reflect an entire worldview in a series of striking images” as developed by the heterodox socialist thinker Georges Sorel.

In this war of words, short-form videos caught on cell phones and sharable across social media platforms is the ammo. Eminently available, infinitely replayable — videos catching gruesome and traumatic crimes in action on transit became inalienable truth bombs that only reinforced the Sorelian myth. Many astute writers about transit, such as Darrell Owens and Alon Levy, have tried to bridge the growing gulf between anti-transit paranoia and matter-of-fact encouraging crime statistics. But the floor keeps moving underneath whenever one tries to drive some stakes into the ground to hold the discourse upright, for moving images from television to Tiktok reels — to paraphrase author William T. Vollmann — has no reverence for time. It matters not if the criminal has been arrested, when the crime occurred, or if the crime is going down. All it needs is just one more crime caught on tape.

Moving images frankly have no reverence for geography either. These videos, whether they mark the specific station or location somewhere, do a sublime job in flattening all geographic terrains into one unspecified plane. A crime in a far-flung subway station in Brooklyn is flattened to a crime on all stations in New York City; a horrific video caught on a bus near the Tenderloin in San Francisco becomes a horror in all buses in San Francisco or anywhere in the Bay Area.

Human geography is a key layer in how we move through our empirical, quotidian world. Call it street smarts or common sense, but we map out in our heads what cities, neighborhoods, street blocks, sidewalks, and even entrances are safe or unsafe into a matrix of deeply rich and textured topology. In the empirical United States of America, we can deduce, correctly, that the sporadic crimes and disorder in public transit networks caught on videos are a downstream effect of disorder and poverty seen above, in our streets. But the camera has no way to overlay this critical contextual layer onto the film. So we get stuck on our phones or desktops, on social media platforms of choice, talking past each other, about whether the subway is either an abattoir of human horrors or a just an okay (but not perfect) way to get around town.

Public safety, perception issue or not, is a real issue that transit agencies across the globe are wrestling over. As I have written, transit agencies across the globe, from China, Thailand, Russia, and Brazil, are testing new military-level technologies and mechanisms to prevent threats of violence and terrorism occurring in its train or stations. No matter the cameras, or the camouflage-clad soldiers on the platforms, I am unsure if these additions can now cut through the noise as it would have years ago.

Public transit unions may be in for an existential fight

Last year, I wrote about the rise and fall of the Japanese national public railway’s labor unions. Once one of the most powerfully represented sectors in a booming economy, railway unions were large, confident, combative, and influential in the Japanese political economy. However, their influence began to wane following a failure of a ten-day strike in 1975, and a new neoliberal movement of bureaucrats and businessmen chipped away at the Japanese National Railways and its unions for a full decade until the unions found themselves facing oblivion. Many unions bent the knee, some fought to the bitter end. Ultimately, long after privatization in 1987, Japanese railway unions are now a fractional shadow of their peak size and powers during the Les Trente Glorieuses period of 1945 to 1975.

It was an existential time for Japanese railway unions; it may be one for its American counterparts. While facing oblivion, the Japanese unions never encountered an outright labor-hostile federal administration, with an unprecedented billionaire with a long history of anti-union bonafides in the United States and abroad leading the crusade to challenge the power of the purse, a funding lifeblood for public transit. The National Labor Relations Board is virtually non-operational at time of publication. It is an unprecedented terrain for most institutions in the public sphere, but perhaps none more vulnerable than labor unions in the public sector, especially public transit.

Privatization now will not save transit

It is clear as day that the current mood with this administration is a reckoning against what they perceive as government waste, fraud, and corruption. Thus it seems inevitable that Trump or Musk will soon dish out regularly the P-word: Privatization. The United States has largely resisted privatization of national (Amtrak) and urban rail transit, largely out of negligence rather than an ideological stand against it. In the current zeitgeist, it seems like a no-brainer that privatization of public transit are back in the cards, perhaps louder than ever before.

I have written extensively about the history of national rail privatization in Japan in my Substack, (and another in South Korea as well). While no scholarly expert, I feel confident to give my simple opinion on privatizing public transit in the United States: it will be a total disaster for two reasons: privatization needs competent and extensive state capacity to be rendered successfully, and privatization is ineffective without giving rail agencies major licenses into land use decisions in and around its networks. If public transit is currently dragging its feet away from the nearing fiscal cliff, a push toward privatization would be like stuffing them in a cannon and firing into the abyss over the cliff. It will be a death knell to the American cities, and to the American economy, as cities still are the predominant economic engines.

First, rail privatization sagas in South Korea and Japan demonstrate that privatization actually requires heaps of state capacity to render successfully. In South Korea, the lack of clear guidance from the national government created confusion that materialized into operational woes and dangerous over-crowding on Seoul Metro’s newest Line 9. In Japan, the push for privatization of the Japanese National Railways in the 1980s came from bureaucrats who targeted two major goals: resolving the massive JNR debt issue through free market mechanisms and crushing the militant labor unions. As they cleared the runway to target both goals, the architects of privatization put in many guardrails — in the form of cleverly accounted government subsidies and holding corporations — to ensure the newly privatized and sectionalized Japanese Railways companies can survive and thrive in its first few years of operation.

At a time where DOGE reigns supreme and the guardrails of governance are totally off and state capacity is being crippled on the daily, I am beyond bearish on the idea that the current United States government will be able to provide the guiding hand to lead a public transit to a sustainable privatization venture. Privatization is not simply jettisoning public goods into the free market ocean in a makeshift dinghy. The New York City Subway is not a memecoin that can be conjured up in hours and put on the market immediately. Transit networks are a web, and a very tangled one, and transformation requires a surgeon’s hand, not those of a half-blind butcher.

Second, privatization also does not resolve a key weakness of American public transit: the toothlessness of its own land use decisions. Nearly all public transit agencies have no or very limited decision-making powers on what they can build in their land next to stations. They are hamstrung by local, state, and even federal entities that severely restrict what they can do on their land. This is a critical tool available in many successful cities with great transit that the United States have deprived for decades.

The common feature which separate countries and cities with great transit and those without is the synchrony and symbiosis between transit and land development. Japan’s privatized mass transit is not successful due to some innate feature of the Japanese people or society, but instead government policies that enabled JR companies to capitalize on its land holdings near urban stations and develop hotels, shopping malls, and office buildings as they saw fit as a major revenue stream to operate its transit. Whereas in the United States, a separation between land use and transit, as if both are intrinsically and mutually exclusive from each other’s welfare, is the law of the land. This tactical divorce has hamstrung American transit (both urban rail and intercity rail, like Amtrak) for decades, depriving agencies from maximizing its land holdings’ potential. Resolving this issue cannot be solved outright in the free market as it is first and foremost a policy issue. Privatization cannot solve this public, political issue that has seeped into every city and every community in this country.

Land use policy is that invisible ledger that accounts for a place’s present shape and form through past decisions and envisions future possibilities (or limitations). One may argue land use is the most potent engine of politics in the current era, in the same vein the late, great philosopher Fredric Jameson mused “in our time all politics is about real estate”.

Americans are getting squeezed on mobility, on all fronts

Americans are sleepwalking into a crisis of mobility — as a practice and as a right, both for self-interest and national health. Consider the following statistics:

• Most of the largest U.S. public transit agencies face a fiscal cliff, as aforementioned

• U.S. pedestrian fatality rates in 2023 by drivers were the highest since 1981

• U.S. car crash fatality rates (per 100k population) in 2023 rose back to 2007-levels after decade-long decline in the 2010s

• Americans spent nearly $50,000 on a new car in December 2024, the second highest month on record

• More than 80% of new car sales in the U.S. are trucks or SUVs, which are getting bigger and thus more likely to kill pedestrians or other drivers in crashes

• Car repair and maintenance costs have risen by nearly 40% since 2020

• Delinquencies on U.S. auto loans in 2024 hit highest levels since 2010

• National gas prices have stayed above $3 per gallon since 2021, the longest stretch since 2011-2014. (It is much higher in select regions, such as the West Coast.)

• All fifteen cities which recorded the largest population adds between 2022-2023 are in the South, per the U.S. Census. The top three cities — San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Charlotte — recorded, in sum, a daily ridership of ~145,000 in 2024. (Their total population: 3.5 million)

• Licensed drivers over the age of 65 has grown from 27.6 million in 2001 to 49.6 million in 2021, per NHTSA. Traffic deaths in 2022 involving drivers over the age of 65 was the highest since 1975.

What am I trying to spell out here with this list? America is already an exceedingly car dependent country, but even cars are becoming too dangerous to drive (or be exposed to other drivers) and too expensive to buy, to make monthly payments for, to buy gas for, to maintain. A government elected in with a vision and compact to its voters may venture to relieve this addiction by making alternative modes of mobility — train, bus, bicycle, paratransit, etc. — more available. Instead, we are flirting with transit Armageddon. What, if any, of these statistics will be moving toward an encouraging direction by January 2029, when this administration’s four-year term is scheduled to end?

Attacks on transit are attacks on American modernity

“Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway's a good thing." - Quote from Caleb Garth, a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

It is impossible to imagine an United States of America without trains. From the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad christening the New World with its first railway in 1827, the Transcontinental Railroad binding the continental closer together in 1869, to Boston’s Tremont Street Subway in 1896 becoming the first subway system, American cities and states were made whole with transit. The United States once was a web of trains and streetcars zig-zagging between towns, cities, and states; even if much of that is gone now, Americans in 2025 roam over its footprints.

It is impossible to imagine a modern world without trains. What 19th century invention has endured in both the logistical and imaginative worlds for 200 years as the humble locomotive running on rail, after all? The eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm credits the railway for breathing new life into a stagnating Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the 1820s and 1830s — the time of Middlemarch — by giving accumulated capital from textile mills a new outlet to invest and expand its markets. New British rail meant new demand for British steel production and British coal mining; and new energy sources and new modes of transportation allowed British capitalism to flourish not only at home but abroad, further entrenching its status of global colonial superpower. Without British colonial capitalism, the world we know it today would be radically, unfathomably different.

It is impossible to interpret the modern world without trains. Trains both gave man wings to travel long distances faster than ever but also captured the once-fleeting time in modern bondage. French novelist Marcel Proust — who used to fall asleep by reading train timetables — quipped “the necessity of not missing the train has taught us to take account of minutes”, forever transforming and hurrying man’s relationship with time. Poets, artists, politicians, and propagandists in Europe, North America, and Asia in both 19th and 20th century sought to channel the train’s dynamism and industrial symbolism for their own purposes to describe the modern world it helped create.

Trains can serve not only as catalysts of the Industrial Revolution and its consequences but also vessels of the ideals of its twin revolution (as also pushed forward by Hobsbawm) which ushered Western modernity: the French Revolution. Trains represent values in the political imagination: communal, egalitarian, climate-friendly, equitable, affordable, and fraternal are among adjectives which may come to mind. Trains — and transit, by large — are often weaponized as political projects of nation-building; whether it be Japan’s Shinkansen, London’s Elizabeth Line, or California’s high-speed rail project, it is packaged to represent a set of ideals of its citizenry and the state together, a potent symbol of the national strength, unity, fluidity, and enterprise. It is perhaps no surprise then that the American right who have written many thoughts against the enduring relevancy of the French Revolution would disdain the ideals trains often come to carry.

The future of trains in America is under threat. This administration has fired its opening salvos against New York City’s congestion pricing plan and California high-speed rail. It is my strong conviction that a meritocratic, truly efficient, and good-faith federal government who believe in freedom of movement would be supporting these projects in full (and continuously and stably and increasingly). Instead, these projects are slung the usual anti-transit bromides: it’s a boondoggle, it’s government waste, it’s anti-freedom, etc. It is to be expected for the next four years.

The true anti-freedom boondoggle is a total car monopoly, by limiting the modes a citizen can choose to travel on and enclosing the possibilities for where mobility can choose to expand and build. Mobility of people, goods, capital, ideas, and values is the cornerstone in which American modernity was founded upon, and any obstacles of its continued growth is an attack on that said mobility. Trains, and transit by large, have played an outsized role in this founding of American modernity despite its longstanding issues and neglect. Attacking transit is to spit on the face of American modernity, a 200-year-old national project whose overarching narrative has been a people, from all corners of the world, on the move for something better.