About 20 to 25 years ago, I took a trip from the US (where I'd lived most of my life) to travel around Europe by train, and I was immensely impressed by its far superior train system. The best trains of all the countries I visited were in Sweden, which had trains which were so modern that they seemed like something out of the future, even compared to the best trains I'd seen in the US by that time, Amtrak trains.

The new BART trains that are only now rolling out remind me a lot of the Swedish trains I saw more than 20 years ago, except that the BART trains have flat panel screens in them that I doubt those Swedish trains had back then, but the Swedish trains had doors that would silently and easily slide open when you held your hands up to them -- that was something that had greatly impressed me back then, because all the trains I'd been to before had really heavy doors that you'd have to struggle with to open by hand, while on the Swedish trains you just held your hand up and the doors would glide open like on the spacecraft on Star Trek.

The whole experience had left me embarrassed for the US, which I'd seen as a technological leader up to that point. I came away from that trip with an impression that the US was very backwards in many ways. The train system and train differences were just one glaring example, but also politically and in many other ways the US was very backwards.

Now finally these new BART trains rolling out, some NYC trains were also modernizing some about a decade ago, but I haven't been to Sweden or much of the rest of Europe in a long time, and I wonder how much further they've progressed.