If I want to visit loved ones these days, I am completely dependent upon air travel. (I drive an old car, and I have learned that driving old cars on long-distance trips just makes them break down faster.) Every time I go to the airport, I am reminded of this fact, and it is deeply frustrating. As I plan in my head the time needed to travel to the airport, time spent waiting in airport lines and security checkpoints, and the method of getting to the airport (ride share, which exploits drivers but is faster than self-driving and parking in an overpriced offsite garage), I am thinking: I wish I could just take a public high-speed train. If the United States were actually on par with the rest of the world, I would be able to do this: my most frequent trips are to places that are 350-550 miles away, distances that are ideal for high-speed rail travel.

But, unfortunately, the U.S., which is one of the richest countries in the world and home to the “world’s largest and busiest airspace,” has not invested much at all in high-speed rail. As Hayden Clarkin, aka The Transit Guy, noted in a blog post last year, when looking at availability of routes between major cities, the U.S. lags far behind in high-speed rail compared to other countries like France, the U.K., Japan, Spain, Italy, and Taiwan. China is the world leader in high-speed rail, which “connects all of the country’s major megacity clusters.” China is also home to the world’s fastest train, which can reach speeds of up to 286 mph. In Morocco, which has Africa’s first high-speed system, trains can reach close to 200 mph. Even India, which is still considered a developing nation by international economic standards, has an ambitious plan to build its own bullet trains in Bengaluru. 

A few years ago, I took the Acela train from Boston to New York City and found myself surprised by how long it took. I can’t remember the exact length of the trip anymore, but my intuition that it should have—and indeed could have—been much faster was correct. It turns out that the U.S.’s fastest train, the Acela, which reaches a speed of up to 150 mph but averages about 66 mph between the two cities, “doesn’t even qualify as high-speed rail by international standards.” My feelings about this train mirror those of Noam Chomsky, who complained about its chronically slow speeds in an interview in 2011:

We happen to be living in a third world country from the point of view of economic and social development. I came back from New York yesterday and I took the fastest train in the country, the Acela. My wife and I took the New York-Boston train sixty years ago - it wasn't called the Acela then - and I think it's improved by about fifteen minutes since then. Any other country in the world would be about half the time. In fact when it's riding along the Connecticut turnpike it's barely keeping up with traffic, which is just scandalous.

Amtrak’s website notes that the Acela East Coast corridor, which includes the route between Boston and NYC, takes a bit over 3.5 hours, which is not much better than the estimated car travel time of 3.5-4.5 hours (not at rush hour) on Google Maps. Of course, time isn’t the only factor here. If I had to choose between two methods of travel that took a similar amount of time, but one held me hostage behind a steering wheel and the other allowed me to sit back, relax, and snooze or work or daydream, I would definitely choose the latter. But still, the U.S. can clearly do better.

Contrast Chomsky’s and my thoughts about the Acela to what Don Moynihan, a public policy expert, had to say recently about public transportation in Switzerland:

Switzerland feels like a rich country, while the United States feels like a country with rich people. The difference is that in Switzerland, the infrastructure is amazing. This is most obviously true with the public transportation system, which combines incredible access with reliability. It feels like a collective commitment to build, maintain, and subsidize a world class public good. [...] My family SwissPass covered trains, buses, boats, trams, funiculars and generally offered a discount on ski-lifts and gondolas (and access to some museums). Physical barriers to transport largely don’t exist. You hop on and off, relying on a trust but verify system. As a result, the user experiences few frictions. We never had to worry about where to get a ticket or how to validate it. I just kept a shot of our travel pass on my phone. [...] Even in more remote areas, a bus connection or train station was never far away. Switzerland has the most dense rail network in Europe.

While Switzerland, a small country, does not have as much high-speed rail as other European countries, clearly its public transportation system is light-years away from anything we have in the United States.

Transit is on my mind a lot these days even when I’m not traveling, because it has become increasingly clear that air safety is a major problem in the U.S. In recent years, we’ve seen a disturbing number of near misses—incidents when airplanes come dangerously close to one another, as documented in a 2023 New York Times analysis of a Federal Aviation Administration safety report. (One “major factor” the Times cites as a cause of the near misses is the “nationwide staffing shortage” of air traffic controllers. In July of last year, the FAA and the flight controllers’ union reached an agreement to give controllers increased rest time between shifts in light of the high-profile near misses.) We’ve seen planes catch fire or parts of them blow out while in the air. Then there have been actual plane crashes as well. Boeing, a major manufacturer of commercial planes, has had numerous problems ranging from its faulty 737 Max planes (including a flawed flight control system that was responsible for two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019) to workers, subcontractors, airlines, and whistleblowers raising countless safety concerns about the company’s parts and/or planes. One former Boeing employee even told Politico last year that he refuses to fly on Max planes himself due to safety concerns! The company has a history of lobbying for aviation safety deregulation as its “corporate culture,” wrote James Surowiecki last year, has changed from being “engineering-centric” to profit focused. The government has taken some oversight actions, but that’s not enough. Frankly, any sane society would have nationalized Boeing by now. (I prefer the version of nationalization where the company is run by the public in a democratic fashion, but there are other proposals as well, like simply breaking it up into several smaller companies that compete with each other.)

The ongoing air safety crisis is not new. As Joseph A. McCartin, author of a book on the subject, explained in Jacobin in 2023, the crisis dates back to the tenure of President Ronald Reagan, who in 1981 fired over 11,000 air traffic controller union (PATCO) members who were striking to demand better working conditions and pay. It goes without saying that mass firing workers in a specialized field was a stupid idea. As McCartin writes, 

Reagan’s decision to ban all strikers meant that it took years for the system to come back to its prestrike staffing levels. [...] That massive bubble of new hires meant that these replacement workers would one day near retirement within a few years of each other, and when new hires were made to replace them, the pattern would be repeated again. Ever since, the Times recently noted, “there have been waves of departures as controllers become eligible for retirement,” and the FAA has struggled to keep pace.

Today, CNN reports that “The stress that goes with the staffing shortage and the six-day work weeks is making it difficult for some to stay as long as they might have with a fully staffed workforce.” Four in ten union members are working long 10-hour shifts because 10,800 people are trying to do the work of 14,600 jobs—an impossible feat. Basically, the government is setting the controllers up to fail, and the public’s safety is in jeopardy as a result. 

The air safety crisis clearly is only going to be solved when the government determines to hire adequate numbers of air traffic controllers and workers are able to gain enough power to optimize their working conditions and pay so that they can do their jobs well—from airplane machinists to air traffic controllers and everyone else who works alongside them. In the meantime, we need to be thinking about how to increase other options of transit for people so that we are not so reliant on air travel—which, besides the safety issues, has become increasingly insufferable with the ever-tinier seats and bathrooms, baggage restrictions and fees, annoying noise levels,¹ and delays in which passengers often are not compensated by the airlines—although a rule put into place by the Biden administration last year has explicitly spelled out conditions under which airlines are now required to compensate passengers for delays. These insufferable conditions, we should remember, are driven by the profit motive. Somewhere in a boardroom at Delta or United Airlines, a group of executives made the calculation that they could increase their revenue by shoving more people into worse seats, and we all have to suffer the consequences.

Flying is a climate justice issue, too. While air travel is responsible for a small fraction of carbon emissions overall, jet aircraft also produce more pollution per kilometer than any other form of travel, and flying is mostly an activity carried out by some 10 percent of humans. Any proposal to adequately deal with climate change will require the top emitters of the world to cut back their carbon emissions as we distribute energy more fairly and work to dramatically reduce emissions overall. There’s no way around it. And these emitters have not, by and large, historically come from the Global South. The U.S. and Europe were heavily responsible for the emissions that got us into this problem. This means that those of us in the United States, western Europe, and other wealthy, technologically advanced countries need to cut back emissions now. The most obvious place to start cutting emissions is with private jets, which ought to be heavily restricted if not banned outright, but air travel as a whole also needs to be dramatically reduced.² 

But the U.S. is going in the wrong direction on both climate and transit. We have become a country that largely shuns public transit in favor of highly polluting private automobiles. This came about, as explained by urban planner Allison Lirish Dean in a recent Current Affairs article on the origins of sprawl, because the U.S. has lacked a strong urban planning tradition, which would have helped us to better plan and build cities that are more pedestrian friendly and transit rich. As Dean explains, the American landscape is instead filled with sprawl. We all recognize sprawl when we see it—endless “expanses of subdivisions, parking lots, drive-throughs, big-box stores, and fast-food chains.” Many of our cities have become spread-out monstrosities thanks to the private sector having had strong influence on government throughout the 20th century. This resulted in legislation that created our highway system and the conditions to create even more sprawl. As a result, America is a car-dependent culture. We are stuck in our cars more than citizens of other wealthy industrialized nations, and our commutes have grown longer. Only around 3 percent of workers commute via public transit. Over the years, we’ve seen an explosive growth in automobile size, and this has made our roadways less safe for both drivers and pedestrians. Dean has made a persuasive case that we must end our addiction to sprawl and transition to walking- and biking-friendly cities with good public transit and high enough density to provide adequate housing, schools, jobs, and other services—not only to improve public health but to address climate change as well. 

I have lived in places where public transit made the use of cars unnecessary—Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lisbon, Portugal. And getting around in those places made me feel much freer than the prison of my American automobile. The MBTA, one of the oldest transit systems in the country, was a revelation to me when I moved to Cambridge for college. I had grown up in Texas, where taking public transit was mostly unthinkable. Lisbon’s metro doesn’t rank particularly high among other European cities but, again, when you’re coming from a car-centric place, just being able to take a train from the city center to a public beach is a welcome change. And I lived almost 20 years in the sprawling city of Houston, where the mind-numbing commutes and traffic were barely tolerable.

It is entirely possible—and desirable—for the U.S. to have a “public transit paradise,” as laid out by Nathan J. Robinson in 2022. But, as Dean explains, we need to treat “transit less like an afterthought for the poor and more like a vital public utility for all.” And we need political will and a government that actually works in the public interest instead of being so “permeable” to the demands of private corporations and investors. 

There are, of course, many private forces working to kill public transit. The Koch brothers, for instance, have been using their vast wealth to kill transit projects for years. Ride-share companies like Uber also have an interest in keeping people dependent upon single-passenger rides. Any fossil fuel company—or those invested in fossil fuels, like the Koch family—naturally has a reason to work against our transition to an ecofriendly public transit system. Elon Musk’s California Hyperloop idea, as Paris Marx reported in 2019, turns out to have been simply a ploy to “get California’s high-speed rail canceled.” Marx further explained online, “Even though [Musk is] lauded for innovation, he’s constantly trying to stifle any efforts to get people out of cars.”

Now, unfortunately, California’s high-speed rail project, some decades in the making, is facing serious problems including delays and rising costs, among others. President Trump, who, as Dean explained, is basically pro-automobile and pro-sprawl, recently said that he plans to “investigate” the project, which probably means he wants to interfere somehow. He said that the project “wasn’t even necessary” because “you take an airplane." (Republicans in Congress, who generally dislike spending on the general public, have also tried to impede the project’s funding.)

California’s problems are not unique. The U.S. has a long history of nightmare transit projects where costs have spiraled out of control and projects were beset by numerous other issues and delays if they were not outright cancelled. Examples include the cancelled Durham-Orange Light Rail and New York City’s ongoing East Side Access Project. (Boston’s Big Dig also comes to mind, but that was a highway project.) Apparently, the U.S. sucks at building not just public transit but infrastructure in general. 

Even when leaders have tried to improve transit, the political opposition has helped thwart them. For example, in his first term, President Obama released a “comprehensive plan” with the goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years” by building a “national high-speed and intercity passenger rail network.” Even though the promise of high-speed rail was something of an overstatement since a large focus was actually on making existing trains faster rather than building new “bullet” train routes, Republican governors happily refused money for their states to build these routes, thus helping to ensure that their citizens would not benefit from federally-funded transit. These kinds of leaders, in the words of Liza Featherstone, “don’t want us to enjoy our public goods and demand more.”

Now, saying we can’t do better because we haven’t so far is precisely the kind of misleading argument we can’t fall prey to. Just as we must keep fighting for Medicare for All and a liveable future on the planet, we must never stop fighting to create good public transit all over the country. As Dean put it to me in an email recently, our government must be re-oriented to serve the public good and must create “strong internal capacity for doing the complex work of building major transit systems. Even in Japan, where transit is quite privatized, there is, as I recently wrote, a strong central government role.”

Because, as Dean pointed out and as urban planner David Zipper writes, the Trump administration is “all-in on cars,” this means that cities and states must work to “substantially upgrade transit, biking, and walking options” even if the federal government tries to kill transit. It’s also why projects like New York City’s year-long free bus pilot, organized in part by socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, are so important. The pilot, which offered a free bus service in each borough for a year, increased ridership among low-income residents and also increased safety—it turns out the fare box is the source of more than a few altercations between operators and riders. While the city’s transit authority has “expressed dissatisfaction with the pilot,” saying it didn’t attract enough new riders, they have not “clarif[ied] what percentage of new riders would have qualified the program as a success.” Free bus pilots have been carried out in other cities, too, with similarly positive results. These pilots demonstrate the difference that free transit at the point of use can make in people’s lives and add more evidence to the already-good case for free transit. In addition to increasing transportation options for low-income people, we also need transit that is accessible for people with disabilities.

There’s no doubt that the scale of work before us is massive. Transportation is the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why we need nothing less than a Green New Deal for public transit.

I remember reading some years ago that activist Greta Thunberg had given up air travel in order to reduce her carbon footprint. On one trip to New York, for instance, in a carbon-neutral yacht powered by solar panels and underwater turbines, her journey across the Atlantic took two weeks. Now, most of us don't have access to such resources, and carbon-free yachts are not going to solve the climate crisis. Thunberg is clearly making a personal sacrifice by slowing down in order to act according to her values. But I do think there is value in slowing down—we often have to slow down to do basic things like rest during illness or even cook ourselves a meal from scratch. If slow travel can be comfortable and enjoyable in some cases—and eco-friendly—why not?

Some people might scoff at the idea of taking a two-week transatlantic boat ride. Why? Because they simply don’t have the time for that or fear that it would be boring. (Thunberg did not find the slow boat boring. She commented on the beauty of the ocean and the enjoyment of not having to do anything.) The deeper issue here is indeed time: why are we so rushed in the first place? As I have written, our society is one of time scarcity because, for most of us, our time is not our own: we often have to fit our lives into our jobs, and our jobs take up at least half of our waking hours. This is not really conducive to a healthy society (and economic precarity makes travel for leisure simply unthinkable for many people), although it makes a small group of people fantastically rich. But until we end the political dominance of the rich, we are going to have a real need and desire to (and I hate saying this) save time. The ultimate goal, though, of high-speed transit and public transit generally is not for us to save time in order to grindset harder. The goal is for it to make our lives better. As Featherstone writes, “public goods” like transit “are for everyone. We feel this on a profound level when we send our kids to public schools, play in public parks, swim at public beaches, and check books out of the library.” These goods “belong” to everyone. The goal of public transit is not only to move everyone around efficiently and enjoyably but to do so within ecological limits. And a vision of a “transit paradise” goes hand in hand with a vision of a society where our time is our own and we are not subject to the edicts of a boss or unelected oligarch. Liberating our physical movement through space is about liberating ourselves entirely from these vampires that are sucking up our time and our lives.

notes

1.

One study that measured noise levels in different aircraft cabins found that while the levels technically fell within the government’s recommended limits for safety, safety levels are not the same as comfort levels. A particular noise level may not damage your hearing, but it can definitely be annoying and disruptive to human physiology.

2.

While there is concern that reduced consumption across the board will reduce our standard of living or be another form of “austerity,” this is not so. As experts like economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito have explained, what we need to do is to create abundance of socially useful public goods (such as transit and healthcare and education and so on) while dramatically reducing unsustainable practices (meat consumption, jet fuel use, and so on).