Comment by carefree-bob

I am skeptical of these "learn the secret of how other culture does X" because it almost always reflects the concerns of the person writing the article rather than shedding light on how a nation does X well. That's because we view the world through the prism of our own concerns, but when we encounter a society that is substantially different from ours -- such as any East Asian society -- then they will have a broad basket of different concerns.

Imagine, for example, that you stumble upon an island of amazing acrobats, they can do fantastic feats. And they are also cannibals. Now the temptation is just too great to say "cannibalism aids in acrobatic skills. Learn from the secrets of the best acrobats". In other words, when looking at a different society, there are just too many differences for you to identify what makes a specific industry work, and what is just cannibalism, unless you do some very, very serious investigative analysis, which this article is not, and even though what you are doing will have high error rates. What you need is the opposite -- a society very close to the US, but with amazing rail. Then emphasizing differences is much more likely to hit on something important for rail.

I could argue the reason Japan has amazing rail was the deflationary period in which the government went on a massive infrastructure spree to stimulate the economy via deficit spending, and this was because of the high Japanese propensity to save in the aftermath of the Plaza accords, and profound risk aversion, as well as their extremely peaceful and law abiding social norms. Good luck on having any of those approaches work well in the US. But hey, once again people focus on their own concerns. I'm sure for someone obsessed with, say, land use rights, they will point out that the what is preventing us from having amazing rail is lack of a Japanese style land management system. And for someone else focused on toll roads, they will say if we had more toll roads, then we would have great public transportation. Of course, India is filled with toll roads, and they are not known for great public transportation. And I could also give examples of nations that did huge infrastructure deficit spending, and they didn't get great infrastructure. Etc. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own concerns. Articles like this, that don't even try to rebut the counter arguments or account for concern-bias, are not impressive.