> First, there's just the willingness to invest in infrastructure, which is nearly non-existent in the US. Swiss people LOVE infrastructure, they are proud of their tunnels, railroads, bridges, dams, etc.

I totally agree with you here. This is the crux of my argument.

Your statement about Switzerland having reasonably dense cities and towns compared with the Bay Area I'm interested in learning more about - can you cite your source? Having lived in Switzerland for almost a year and in the Bay Area for almost 4, this doesn't ring true to me, but I don't have a heat map of population density to check against; if I get more time at some point I'll try to find more data.

Regardless, we do have some areas of sufficient population density that it would make sense to connect efficiently and we don't. That's the choice I'm talking about. At the very least, it should be easy to get between Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose without needing a car. Within San Francisco, you should be able to go from the east side to the west side without using a system that suffers from being delayed at least 50% of the time.

Also - regarding more vacation days? The government already mandates 4 weeks of vacation (5 if you're under 20) and you are supposed to take at least two of those weeks in a row.