The Swiss town of Chur, which has the same population as Menlo Park, California, and which is a good distance from Zurich, as Menlo Park is from San Francisco, has five S-Bahn trains every hour, all day long, plus 9 other regional, interregional, and intercity trains per hour.
There's nothing fundamental about trains that says you have to have insulting levels of service. It's a choice.
I don't think you can hold any American state to that level of expectation when they are 70 years late in their railroad infrastructure. Not even California would be able to match a 1/10 of your rail service before 2050.
Eh, you can't compare a local area GDP to a national GDP like this. Yes, tons of software licensing and ad revenue are funneled to the SF region giving us a local area GDP of 591 Billion dollars[1] which is comparable to Switzerland's $750 Billion, but if you try to convert that regional income into infrastructure spending, you'll find that
1) the ability of the bay area to tax that 591 Billion is much less than the ability of Switzerland to tax it's economic activity, as Switzerland captures ~32% of it's national income, while the bay area captures something like 10% of its regional income, so a ballpark 1/3 deflator.
2) once revenue is obtained from taxing, the efficiency with which the distributed bay area governments can make use of the tax revenue is much, much lower than the efficiency with which the Swiss government can spend the money. I'd estimate a 1/10 deflator. This is because we will waste tons of money doing various studies, funnelling side payments to local machine politics, battling environment impact reports in courts, funding various diversity and equity initiatives, and set up a dozen committees to oversee the spending plans.
3) once a dollar is actually spent on the production of infrastructure in the bay area, you'll find that the we will get much, much less for that dollar in infrastructure spending then the same dollar spent in Switzerland on infrastructure. I'd say another factor of 1/3 as per https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
So when you multiply all those deflators, you'll find that our 591 Billion can be usefully channelled to 1/90 * 591/750 ~= 1% of the useful infrastructure that Switzerland has.
Which seems about right.
Remember it cost San Francisco $3 Billion for the DTX[2] which is 2 kilometers of transit. We are not Switzerland, we are a dysfunctional, corrupt, patchwork of local governments that doesn't really understand much of anything when it comes to infrastructure or efficient government.
[1] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=70&step=1&acrdn...
[2] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...
Not so fast! It's easy to blame your government for all the things broken in your region, but they really are a mirror of your society. Switzerland has a nice rail system despite being located on the highest mountain chain in Europe, because their people don't turn on each other's at the first occasion. They don't even speak the same language in half of the country ! Yet, the rails don't stop between cantons.
If you want a functioning government and infrastructure, start by changing your individualistic culture, start trusting one another (by not wearing guns, for example), stop thinking you're the best at everything and keep being a place that inspires the rest of the world. You used to be a great country, spearheaded technologies, cured diseases and acted as a role model. Today, it's not the case anymore. Recognize that and you will be able to fix something.
It’s also a safe bet that, for example, nobody reading this wears a gun regularly.
If it were that simple, no country would have any problems, and everywhere would look like Wakanda.
I think I have seen this once in my life living in the US since birth. It was a super disturbing weird thing for me.
It seems like you’re going off a bunch of tropes and seeing the US as homogenous.
But we also can't divert the overspending on rail to just building more buses, so don't worry. :) Choice would be nice.