>>1271801I will say this to you about American systems vs European systems or East Asian systems. In Europe, the systems are, or were until the last decade, built for uniform societies. German transit systems are built by and for, are staffed by, and are used by Germans. The same goes for France, Italy, Spain, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, and all the other European countries. The same applies to East Asia. In America I want to say first for all the foreigners on the board, that even when the country was 86% white, there was never a single American culture or people in terms of a unified culture. rather there was a common cultural denominator that everyone subscribed to but the different regions where very distinct from one another. So people did not always stay on the same page when implementing things and a uniform approach to public transit never developed. Now back to today, what you have is no common denominator of people, but rather various mixtures of le 56% mutt none of whom really have any common background with anyone else, which makes it very difficult to form and maintain a cohesive society with which to build and implement a shared vision for large scale projects like nation-wide or region-wide rail transport. With this in mind, you can see why we have gone from having a bunch of localized and distinct but independently functional transit systems, to a bunch of dysfunctional systems.
