And not by crashing the economy and leaving you jobless! No, he has a brilliant plan!
Zero-emissions buses, powered by unicorn farts and that magical fairy piss pouring from the outlets in your walls, not that filthy fossil fuel! Funding road and infrastructure improvements, just like Obama did (that never happened)! Trying to undo the fuckup that is Amtrak by throwing money at it (just like how we fixed the Postal Service)! Mo' bettah buses, even mo' and bettah than the magical ones from Point One! Mo' and bettah roads and bridges, even mo' and bettah than in Point Two!
And all powered by Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, because they are our strengf.
God, I fucking hate Amtrak.
I admit, I'm a nerd. I think trains are cool. The idea of a cross-country train-trip is really cool.
Then I looked up the prices.
Yeah, it would be cheaper for me to fly to Europe than it would be for me to pay for a multi-day Train trip. There are travel youtube channels that show what you get when you do that. And while neat... definitely not worth the fucking price.
...and then I look over at Japan, where you can pay the cost of a cheap motel room and get something that's so much better in terms of space, amenities, luxury...
Look, I get it. The rail system in America is for moving goods, not people. Two completely different things, with radically different requirements. America has alot more distance to cover, Japan has the luxury of a single-ethinicity in terms of diversity, so on and so forth.
But I can't deny, that I'm envious as fuck.
Besides the natural market forces that worked against trains in the wide continental US vs. Japan, we could have done a lot better supporting competing operators to keep the service running and perhaps lower costs in the long run... but leave it to the government to screw everything up.
Not being full of Johnny Somalis jumping the gates sure helps.
The passenger rail service in the U.S. has three major problems going against it.
One, most of our major rail lines are old, and either have too many level crossings or too many turns to be safely used at any real speed. As Texas and California are finding out, solving these issues takes a lot of money, if you don't have buy-in from the populace. If you do have buy-in, it gets easier (Shinkansen lines pay a small "rent" payment for using land, and Brightline in Florida does a lot of PR explaining why letting them expand will improve the area.)
Two, as the Japanese and French have found out, if the train ride is longer than 3 hours, airlines will win out. This is why the Japanese are trying to bring their Maglev trains online ASAP- they can make power easily and cheaply (yay, nuclear plants), and they don't have to import the infrastructure and fuels like they do with planes.
Three, government impedance. Before Amtrak, there were passenger train services that had figured out how to do things planes couldn't. If you were a businessman in the Midwest and wanted to get to either coast for an early meeting, you had to fly in at night and book a hotel, or get up super early. With a train, you could show up at the station at dinnertime, eat and sleep on the train, and wake up the next morning at your destination. Amtrak can't even keep a schedule.
Four: homeless people and blacks committing nonstop crime on public transit. That doesn’t happen in Asia.