Dan Wang

It's not always very reliable.

And I find that it is really, really wobbly.

And while I was on the AccelerTrain, I came across this headline, AccelerTrain is getting an upgrade.

We're going to get new trains.

And I was happy about that until I read deeper into the article that said that new trains are going to be something like 11 minutes slower than the old trains.

And so, you know, at a first approximation, we're moving slower than before.

The foam seats are better.

They're more comfortable, but we're going to take longer to actually get to D.C.

And I substantially wrote this book in my cloistered office at Yale University.

And every so often I was tired of monastic life and I decided to be seduced by the pleasures of New York City.

I take the Metro North train to get from New Haven down to New York City.

That train is highly reliable.

It's a little bit slow.

And I was radicalized when I found a timetable from 1914 in which it was faster to get from Grand Central Terminal in New York to New Haven about 100 years ago than it is today.

It's not totally apples to apples comparison because the train now makes many more stops.

But again, at a first approximation, we're moving slower than 100 years ago.

And that is in part because

because of the lawyerly society in which a lot of homeowners in Connecticut put up their hands and said, we shall not have a rail line running through our backyard.

And that proposed route of Amtrak turned out to be much more squiggly after these homeowners decided to use their very expensive lawyers to sue and say, no way in our backyard.

And that has added quite a lot of time to and quite a lot of expense to these projects, which cannot be very technocratically, rationally designed.