The Safety Of Trains v. Cars and Trucks

Understanding Rail Accident Risks With Appropriate Context

Honestly, it is surprising that so many railway deaths are not in the right of way (ROW). The defining characteristic of rail transportation is that it travels on fixed tracks which have a right of way.

There are extremely rare incidents of someone getting killed from a train while not being on the tracks - like when it falls off a bridge and kills someone below as one did not so long ago on I-25 near Pueblo, or when an accident releases a poisonous gas that kills people outside the ROW but nearby which happened to the parents of one of my first clients - but those are vanishingly rare.

Of course, what they are really doing in these statistics is distinguishing between deaths in the ROW at highway crossings and deaths in the ROW at something other than highway crossings, and basically ignoring the tiny percentage of deaths that fall in neither category.

The regulatory focus on highway crossings to the near exclusion of safety measures in railroad railways isn't unreasonable.  According to the Federal Railway Administration:

Highway-rail grade crossings are intersections where highways cross railroad tracks at-grade. Approximately 212,000 highway-rail grade crossings exist on the approximately 140,000 miles of track that make up the United States’ railroad system.

If we conservatively assume that the average highway rail grade crossing is 105.6 feet (i.e. 0.02 miles), then there are 4,240 miles of track in highway-rail grade crossings, which is about 3% of the total miles of track in the U.S. (and realistically the truth is probably closer to 1-2%). 

While only 30% of rail deaths nationally are at highway crossings, the number of deaths per mile of track are 10-30 times greater at highway crossings than they are away from them. But, the cost of safety measures to prevent rail deaths is roughly proportional to the length of the track when they are put in place.

Also, both passenger rail and freight rail cause far few deaths per passenger-mile than cars, to both passengers (who are safer by a factor of seventeen) and bystanders like pedestrians and bicyclists and people other cars, and per freight ton-mile than trucks carrying freight to both operators and bystanders.

In the U.S., in 2024, there were 954 railroad deaths and 6,542 nonfatal railroad injuries.

(Source)

There is about 1 fatal rail death away from highway crossings per 196.5 miles a track away from highway crossings, and there is about 1 fatal rail death per 806 highway crossings at highway crossings. Vanishing few fatal rail deaths are to people on the train itself 

People on railroad tracks who shouldn't be (i.e. trespassers) account for 69% of railroad deaths, but only about 10% of nonfatal railroad injuries, because 51% of rail accidents involving trespassers that make it into official statistics are deadly. 

The vast majority of rail traffic in the U.S. is freight. U.S. freight rail carried 1.71 trillion ton-miles per year with about 100 tons per train car. So, about 17,000 million train car-miles per year. 

Amtrak provides 6544 million passenger miles per year of transportation. About 35% of those are in the Northeast Corridor which run about 80% full on average and about 65% are outside the Northeast Corridor which run closer to 50% full on average. A coach car holds about 74 people which is about 59 people per car in the Northeast Corridor and about 37 people outside it. So, about 39 million train car miles per year in the Northeast Corridor and about 115 million train car miles per year outside the Northeast Corridor, for a total of about 152 million train car miles per year.

So, about 0.9% of train car miles are passenger train car miles and about 99.1% of train car miles are freight train car miles.

If rail deaths are no more likely, per train car mile, to be caused by freight train cars than by passenger train cars (although arguably the risk is per train and not per train car, in which cars passenger trains which have far fewer cars per train are much more dangerous, even though this is harder to estimate), we can reasonably estimate that passenger trains kill about 12 people per year on average (2 passengers and 10 other people), while freight trains kill about 942 people per year on average. Adjusting for train car length who shift this somewhat from freight trains to passenger trains, but even so, freight trains would be the dominant issue.

Do Existing Rules Reflect The True Nature Of The Problem

Of course, it only makes sense to take measures to reduce right of way deaths away from highway crossings if there is an effective (and cost effective) way to do so. 

People walk across and along train tracks all the time, and since trains are noisy, and you only need to move a few feet away from train tracks to avoid being hit by one, normally walking across or along train tracks is pretty safe, so long as you are able to hear them coming, you pay attention, you don't fall asleep on them, you don't get stuck on them, and you get out of the way when they come. And, it isn't really clear what the statistics use to define a trespasser, and we can't really understand the statistics without knowing this definition.

Is a trespasser merely someone who is in the right of way at all? Is a trespasser someone who tries to hitch a ride on a train that isn't using it like a passenger on a typical passenger train? Or what?

Common intuition wouldn't consider crossing over a train track when there is no indication that a train is coming, away from a highway crossing, to be trespassing, nor would common intuition consider walking along a train track in the right of way when there is no indication that a train is coming to be trespassing. I did that on my walk to and from school in junior high school almost every school day for two years without anyone even suggesting that I was trespassing.

Crossing a highway crossing when there are indications that a train is coming such as flashing lights or barriers that come down probably is trespassing, but that obviously doesn't apply when you aren't at a highway crossing.

The Federal Railway Administration, however, begs to differ, stating:

It is illegal to access private railroad property anywhere other than a designated pedestrian or roadway crossing. Trespassers are most often pedestrians who walk across or along railroad tracks as a shortcut to another destination. Some trespassers are loitering or are engaged in recreational activities such as taking photographs, jogging, bicycling, hunting, or operating recreational off-highway vehicles (ROVs). Riding ROVs along railroad tracks leads to the erosion of an important part of the track foundation known as ballast, or the rock and soil material that supports the ties and rail.

But, this definition is awfully harsh. From a pedestrian's perspective, it is often much safer to walk across or along railroad tracks away from a designated roadway crossing, than it is to cross at a highway crossing where there is much more frequent and less noisy car traffic, or across open ground away from the railroad right of way (indeed, railroads that are no longer in use are often converted to pedestrian trails for just this reason) which may constitute trespassing on private property (which is dangerous in much of rural America) and is sometimes uncleared brush. 

Sticking to official pedestrian routes is challenging. Many rural areas have no sidewalks, and walking along rural roads at night can be much more dangerous than walking along railroads. 

Designated pedestrian crossings are extremely very rare outside of dense urban areas and resort areas, because they aren't cost effective in places with little pedestrian traffic and only marginal safety risks to the pedestrians who do without them. 

But train tracks have to be crossed somewhere to get from point A to point B in many cases, because tracks often split whole states in two. 

In flat farmland, highway crossings are often a mile to six miles apart, and highway crossings can be even more sparse in mountains, forests, wetlands, and deserts. 

These detours can be tolerable in a car or a motorcycle, but represent immense delays relative to crossing a train track away from a highway crossing for a pedestrian who may have to cross that track to get to school or work or a friend's house on a regular basis.

So, simply writing off people who are simply meeting the strict FTA definition of rail right of way trespassing as "at fault" is really unreasonable, blames the victim, and unreasonably protects railroad operators from legal liability when the common law "Learned Hand" test for negligence liability (i.e. that the probability adjusted risk of harm is greater than the cost of a measure that would prevent that harm) would hold railroad operators liable for these injuries if they didn't take reasonable and cost effective measures to prevent them.

In the face of unreasonable trespassing definitions and regulations of pedestrians near train tracks, even extremely expensive preventative measures, like tall fences, will be routinely circumvented. And, authorities won't do much to prevent the harm, because the authorities seeing the situation up close will be aware that these work arounds that circumvent overkill prevention measures like tall fences, will mostly do more good than harm.

Also, my intuition is that ordinary pedestrians walking across or along railroad tracks, especially in rural and suburban areas, are not at all typical of people who are killed in rail accidents, because it is so easy to hear trains coming and because it is so easy in most cases to get out of the way. I suspect that these cases probably actually make up less than 10% of rail accidents involving pedestrians, even though the FTA itself admits on its own website that this is the predominant form of "trespassing" in rail right of ways.

Instead, I suspect that the typical cases that result in serious injury or death are very different. 

Maybe the pedestrian is a young child to little to appreciate the risk of being on train tracks when one can hear a train coming. Maybe the pedestrian is deaf or wearing headphones. 

Maybe the pedestrian falls asleep on the tracks while drunk, on drugs, or homeless, mistakenly thinking that this particular track which has low frequency traffic has been abandoned entirely. Maybe the pedestrian has been assaulted or knocked unconscious and left on the tracks. 

Some of these cases may be close to the boundary between reckless behavior indifferent to the grave risk that they will be killed and full fledged intentional suicide a bit like playing Russian roulette. 

Maybe the pedestrian is trying to hitch a ride on a freight train and stumbles. 

Maybe the pedestrian is on a rail bridge or other part of the right of way where there is no easy place to move and get out of the way of the train when it is coming. Maybe the pedestrian somehow gets stuck on the tracks with a foot wedged into a gap or is trying to rescue someone else.

Ideally, better data would add insight that the official statistics do not, and we wouldn't have to rely on intuition. But, relying in intuition grounded in common sense and lived experience until better data is available, is usually better than taking no action at all until better data is available, especially if the measures suggested by that intuition aren't terribly expensive or difficult to implement.

If my intuition is right and these are the predominant cases of result in rail deaths or injuries to "trespassers", then the broad FTA definition in addition to blaming the victim, also undermines its effectiveness by being so broad that it fails to distinguish between reasonable conduct that is only dangerous in the most freak circumstances and unreasonable conduct that really does pose an extraordinary risk of death which should be actively policed to prevent rail deaths and injuries. By not tolerating reasonable conduct, the overbroad definition undermines its own effectiveness at preventing the harms it is designed to discourage.

Distinguishing between "safe trespassing" within the FTA definition and "unsafe trespassing" within the FTA is also critical to determining what kind of preventative measures could reduce rail right of way deaths and injuries.

Possible Infrastructure Based Solutions To Reduce Harm

If the real problem is predominantly people who fall asleep or are otherwise unconscious or stuck or inert on train tracks away from highway crossings, then the solution might be to periodically put something like a LIDAR sensor along active train tracks that warn the train operator of the obstruction in time to stop the train (which could take more than a mile of warning about a minute before the train reaches that point), which would prevent not only deaths to trespassers, but also train collisions with fallen trees, large sleeping wildlife (for which "cow catchers" were designed in an earlier era), and debris carried there by a storm. These preventative measures weren't really technologically feasible or cost effective in the late 19th century and early 20th century when existing freight rail systems were invented. But now, these kinds of sensors and a way to send their signals to trains on the routes are cheap and easy to retrofit commercial off the shelf technologies that require only minor modifications for this application.

At crossings, something like a LIDAR system, or even just an "emergency stop" switch that someone could activate in the highway crossing infrastructure, could reduce the number of collisions arising from vehicles stuck at a highway crossing. Even if the warning was transmitted to the train when it was too late to come to a full stop, on oncoming train aware of an imminent collision could slow down as much as possible and activate maximum warning sirens to mitigate the magnitude of the harm from an unstoppable collision and could alert first responders so that they could on their way to the scene of the nearly inevitable collision before it even happened, in situation where every moment counts in saving someone's life. 

If a big part of  the problem is people who are deaf or wearing headphones, bright, flashing, motion sensor activated lights that only go off when trains are actually coming, located away from highway crossings, which are also cheap, easy to retrofit, commercial off the shelf technologies could do the trick, and might even reduce the need for loud train horns in the middle of the night.

The solutions above would be cheap, and could be implemented at a very manageable cost by railroad operators in response to newly adopted safety regulations (which would prevent a race to the bottom by profit minding companies competing with each other) over a period of perhaps five or ten years.

If the problem is people trying to hitchhike on train cars, hobo style, maybe a partial solution would be to design train cars so that they are difficult to ride or mount, without ladders or anything else to grip, and with the top of enclosed freight cars designs with pitched roofs that are too steep to rest upon for any length of time.

This would be very expensive to retrofit, but if the new design standards were imposed only prospectively to newly purchased freight cars as they were replaced over their useful lives, the new design would probably not be much more expensive than the old one, and as the percentage of new design cars increased over time, the entire strategy of hobo style hitchhiking on freight trains would grow increasingly less popular.

This gradual replacement would also dovetail with reduces consumption of coal, which is the single largest component of of rail freight, in favor of renewables, nuclear, and natural gas transported by pipeline, and declining consumption of liquid fossil fuels (another major component of rail freight) as electric vehicles gradually replace internal combustion engine vehicles, with freight rail instead being used to ship more containerized cargo.

Regular underpasses or overpasses for wild animals might not save many human lives but might prevent train collisions with wild (or domestic) animals that are unable to get out of  the way in time or don't realize the risk, which is surely something that both conservationists and train operators would appreciate, which is fundamentally, very low tech, like Roman Empire class civil engineering. But these measured could potentially be quite expensive to retrofit into existing rail lines. Still, good data on "rail kill" could identify the areas where these kinds of collisions are most common so that the investment in these solutions could be implemented first where it would do the most good, and these standards could be established for new rail lines (mostly proposed high speed rail lines).

Admittedly, none of these measures would be very effective against someone who is simply reckless to the point of being virtually suicidal, or someone who is actually suicidal. 

For these cases, a highly targeted campaign of public service announcements, that focuses only on the conduct that other preventative measures can't deal with, that actually is high risk, in channels that the people most likely to act this way are most likely to hear and take seriously may be the best possible solution - a bit like the campaigns in the 1980s about drunk driving and the importance of having a designated driver. A PSA campaign probably wouldn't be as effective as some of the new safety infrastructure suggested in this post, but it would almost surely make some difference if it was well done.

Long Haul Amtrak Trips Still Make No Sense

This meme is misleading (in addition to being inaccurate).

I favor abolishing Amtrak outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other select (locally subsidized) routes for good reason. And, while there can be good public policy reasons for subsidizing transportation routes that otherwise make sense, there isn't a good public policy reason for heavily subsidizing a train trip that makes no sense as transportation and is really just a rolling hotel with pretty scenery along the way.

Long haul travel on low speed Amtrak passenger rail is very slow, unreliable, makes no economic sense, is more polluting than flying, is more dangerous than flying, and also undermines the quality of intercity bus options.

Travel By Commercial Airline

A non-stop flight between the same cities takes 5 hours and 22 minutes (an average of 541 mph) and costs $247 (and you won't spend nearly as much on food en route). Add $40 for a checked bag to make it more comparable to the car or train options. It might cost $60 to get to and from the airport, $20 for food en route, and 3 hours to get to and from the airport. No motel or hotel charges are necessary.

Total cost $367. Total time 8 hours, 22 minutes (an average of 347 mph). Federal airline subsidies for trip $32. Carbon dioxide: 840 pounds.

(All subsidy data in this post is from here).

Travel By Car

This trip takes 42 hours driving time by car traveling 2905 miles at an average of 69 mph (with at least $100 of tolls, motel charges for two nights of at least $60, and the cost of food for three days of at least $90). Gas at an average of 27 mpg (the average for a midsized sedan) at the national average of $31.6 a galloon is about $340, and one oil change for at least $30, so at least $620 before considering the cost of the car (which is at least 5 cents a mile which is $145). Realistically, you'll need at least 20 hours of stops in addition to the driving time.

Total cost $765. Total time 62 hours (an average of 47 mph). Federal highway subsidies for trip $32. Carbon dioxide: 2000 pounds. 

You are 104 times as likely to die on the car trip as the plane trip, and 17 times as likely to die on the car trip as the train trip.

Travel By Train

It take 79 hours and 17 minutes (on average) by train, which is an average of 37 mph (and the cheapest price I could find is $343 for the trip not the $213 quoted). Food would probably run at least $180. It might cost $30 to get to and from the train station and an additional hour of travel time. This ticket price, by the way, is in an upright seat the entire trip, not a sleeper car. If you want a sleeper car on this trip that takes more than three full days, you'll pay about $1600 more. All other options considered here assume that you'll sleep in a bed every night.

Total cost: $553. Total time 80 hours and 17 minutes (an average of 36 mph). Federal Amtrak subsidies for trip: $1,046. Carbon dioxide: 1000 pounds. You are 6 times more likely to die on the train trip as the plane trip.

Biking Or Riding A Horse

The trip by train is about three times faster than traveling by bicycle or horse (which would take about six days).

The bike trip would also cost about $800 (more than a car trip) due to the increased food and motel costs and some bike maintenance, and would have a roughly $32 government subsidy (but would be greener than any of the alternatives) and would probably be at least ten times more dangerous than driving a car and wouldn't afford much opportunity to read or work on the way. This trip would leave you much more fit, however.

The horse trip would cost much more (it would be the most expensive option by far) because stables and food for the horse aren't cheap. This would also be more dangerous than driving a car (although exact statistics on the safety of long haul horse travel as of 2024 are hard to come by) and wouldn't afford much opportunity to read or work on the way.

Comparisons

Low speed passenger rail on Amtrak is at its worst on long haul trips.

A plane is 72 hours faster and $187 cheaper than a train, and the plane is safer. (The plane is still $57 cheaper even if you find a $213 train ticket.) And, this doesn't include the $1,034 greater amount of government subsidies on the train ticket than on the plane ticket. The plane is also about 16% greener than the train.

A plane is 53 hour and 38 minutes faster and $398 cheaper than traveling by car (but you have a car at your destination, although that is as much a minus as a plus in San Francisco and New York City which have good transit systems). The government subsidies for the trip are basically identical for the plane and the car trip. The plane is about 58% greener than the car.

Also, you can't do any work or reading while driving for 42 hours or sleeping for 16 hours (all but 4 hours of your trip, some of which will be spent eating or shower or stretching), while you can do either while flying or during your waking hours on the train.

The Environmental Impact Explained

On a long haul, cross-country trip, the plane is greener than the train (which in turn, is greener than the car).

A nonstop flight from New York to San Francisco emits, on average, about 840 pounds of carbon dioxide per economy class passenger, according to Google Flights, whose data is independently reviewed. That’s equivalent to burning 420 pounds of coal, or more than the annual emissions of someone living in Cameroon. Air travel is wildly polluting.

But what about trains? I tracked down several estimates of carbon emissions per passenger-mile, including Amtrak’s official estimate. What I got back: My cross-country train journey had emitted somewhere from 950 to 1,133 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger.

What!?

There are a few reasons for this result. Amtrak is far cleaner than flying where its tracks are electrified, along the Northeast Corridor, from Washington to Boston. But outside the Northeast, Amtrak trains run on diesel, a highly polluting fuel.

What’s more, Amtrak’s trains are decades old. (Its single-level Amfleet cars were built in the late 1970s.) Add to that generous seat pitches, large old-fashioned private rooms for longer-distance trains, a longer, winding route across the country and “per-passenger-mile emissions go through the roof,” said Justin Roczniak, a co-host of “Well There’s Your Problem,” a podcast about engineering.

Amtrak is still the more climate-friendly option for the vast majority of travelers, who on average travel 300 to 400 miles, said Olivia Irvin, a spokeswoman for the rail company. (That is, not many people are crazy enough to go cross-country by train.) A 2022 Department of Transportation study found that traveling by train from Los Angeles to San Diego generated less than half the emissions, per passenger, of flying, or driving. For Boston to New York, an electrified route, taking the train generated less than a fifth the emissions of flying or driving.

It’s when journeys start getting longer than about 700 miles that planes start to gain an advantage on trains. Planes burn the most fuel when they take off and climb to altitude. That makes short flights very inefficient — you’re burning all that fuel only to travel a short distance. (Some countries, like France and Spain, have tried to ban the shortest flights when rail alternatives are available.)

Longer flights also tend to use larger aircraft, which provide economies of scale. And aircraft have become more fuel-efficient over the years. But choosing flights with several connections, for example, can quickly add to your footprint, because you’re taking off and landing multiple times.

From the New York Times.

American Suburbs Are Still Stupid

 

Simple Solutions To Big Problems

I'm a "Fox" and not a "Hedgehog". I know many things and focus on details rather than "one big thing" that solves every problem. 

But, I'm going to try to put on my hedgehog hat and come up with ways to address some of the biggest problems facing the U.S. today if forced to suggest just three solutions to each of them. The point of this exercise is partially to force prioritization of lists of proposals that can get bogged down with good ideas to solve small problems or to make lower priority reforms to big problems.

Affordable Housing and Homelessness

Housing prices in major metropolitan areas are high. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Eliminate virtually all zoning regulations of residential density, parking requirements,  minimum lot sizes, and regulation of the purposes for which buildings can be used. This primarily reduces the land value part of housing costs which is the main factor that makes housing in big cities so much more expensive. 

What is another big thing that we can do to address that?

End all property tax funding of public schools and replace the lost revenue, dollar for dollar, with increased state income taxes. This will typically reduce property taxes by more than 50% freeing up income for making principal and interest payments. It would also reduce inequities in school funding and would be more progressive as a tax source.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Spend whatever it takes to provide basic housing first, immediately, to every single homeless person in the United States. Housing first is cheaper than letting people live on the street and paying the costs of that. This is less burdensome on the health care system, reduces crime, and improves quality of life for both the people who would be homeless and the people that their being homeless in their neighborhoods would impact.

Health Care

The U.S. pays far more per person for healthcare than any other country on the planet and gets poor results for its money, while inflicting great financial hardship on people. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Adopt "Medicare for All" financed with a higher Medicare payroll tax and a higher Obamacare tax on investment income. Roll in long term care coverage currently paid for, for many people, with the Medicaid long term care program. 

End Medicaid. End the Medicaid Estate Recovery System (i.e. the poor man's death tax). End private health insurance. End worker's compensation coverage of medical expenses. End the separate veteran's healthcare programs. End Obamacare insurance premium subsidies. End health insurance tax deductions and employer health insurance mandates and private health insurance mandates. End lawsuits by private individuals to pay for medical expenses. End casualty insurance policies designed to cover liability for medical expenses in lawsuits. This would greatly reduce administrative cost waste, bad debt, denial of care, linkage of health care to employment, would reduce health insurance and worker's compensation and CGL insurance expenses for businesses, would simplify tax returns for individuals, and would facilitate more effective cost control on provider payments. It would also increase use of preventative care thereby reducing more expensive acute care and would shift expensive ER care for the currently uninsured to more appropriate lower cost providers. This would especially help working class people who are mostly likely to have inadequate health insurance and to struggle with paying medical bills.

In round numbers, the U.S. federal and state governments spend about $2 trillion a year on Medicare, Medicaid, and VA health care, private health insurance policy premiums are about $1.5 trillion a year, and out of pocket health care expenses are about $0.5 trillion a year, for a total of $4 trillion a year of spending on health care, which still leaves about 27 million people without health insurance (in a country with about 336 million people). Cutting administrative costs, profits, marketing, provider level health insurance claim processing, bad debt expenses for providers, shifting ER care for the uninsured as a last resort to primary care and urgent care, price negotiation with providers from drug providers to hospitals to physicians and nurses, since the U.S. pays higher prices for everything than anyplace else in the world, substitution of preventative care that is foregone for cost reasons for later acute care, reduced worker's compensation, car insurance, homeowner's insurance, and other casualty liability insurance premium rates since they don't have to cover health care expenses, state and local public hospital funding, public employee health care funding, and reduced personal injury litigation costs associated with shifting payment obligations for medical expenses, could cut that $4 trillion to $3 trillion (about 25%). So, public expenditures for health care at all levels of government combined would increase by about 50% over current levels (some of which would be covered by eliminating tax exclusions, tax deductions and credits for health care under existing tax law) while largely eliminating household level and business level health care expenses, ending medical expense driven bankruptcies and collect litigation costs, and lower other household and business insurance premiums, and covering all 27 million of the uninsured. Tax bills for households and businesses would go up, but a lot of wasted time in households and businesses dealing with health insurance and medical bill related issues would disappear.

What is another big thing we can do to address that?

Legalize "recreational" drugs in a highly regulated and controlled manner similar to Colorado's marijuana legalization to reduce harm, while providing strong support for substance abuse treatment including drug based therapies and inpatient treatment funded with Medicaid for All resources. This would dramatically reduce the overdose epidemic, and would improve recovery rates for alcoholics and drug addicts, something that takes a particular toll on the poor and working class. This would also dramatically reduce gang crime and organized crime and would cripple cartels, and would reduce crime by addicts and would reduce incarceration costs associated with controlled substance users and jail deaths from drug withdrawal. The reduced demand would also dramatically reduce crime abroad from Columbia to Mexico, which would reduce the flow of refugees and migrants to the U.S. and would reduce corruption in the affected governments.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Double the number of medical student slots for educating physicians by expanding medical school capacity and building new medical schools. We shouldn't have the same number of MD education slots as we did fifty years ago, with twice the population, and there is no shortage of highly qualified premed graduates to fill those slots. Limited supply also drives ups provider costs. Ending student loans for medical students and Medicaid for All ending bad debt issues and administrative costs for self-employed doctors and lowering malpractice insurance coverage due to not having to pay for malpractice related medical bill compensation would also allow reduced MD charges without undue hardship for MDs.

Higher Education

It is very expensive to go to college and many people leave college with large student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Many kids who are ready for college don't go, but many kids who aren't ready for college go at great expense in public funds and for themselves. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Provide 100% grant based funding for tuition, room, board, and books to students pursuing higher education whose grades and test scores and other factors show that they have at least a 50% chance of completing the higher educational program that they are enrolled in. Do not fund higher education for people who have a low chance of completing the higher educational program that they are enrolled in. End government sponsored or guaranteed student loans. This would much better utilize our nation's supply of academically competent students while reducing dropouts and failures by people who aren't currently ready for college at great expense and undermining personal self-worth. The status quo of indiscriminate state subsidies to in state students and very low admission thresholds that insure that huge percentages of students admitted at public and for profit colleges drop out without degrees is wasteful while still excluding poor and working class students at high levels from the system. Some of the political alienation towards higher education also comes from people who tried and had bad experiences since they weren't ready and dropped out and from people who were shut out of the system when they were prepared and take a sour grapes attitude towards it.

What is another thing we can do to address that?

Improve apprenticeship systems and vocational education programs, both for high school aged students whose academic performance indicates that traditional liberal education programs in a four year program don't make sense for them, and through community colleges. Adopt occupational specialty identification and training approaches used by the U.S. military for enlisted recruits for civilians. This would provide a path to missing middle occupations and recognize that not going to college doesn't have to mean that there is no path to the American dream.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Forgive all existing federally guaranteed or federally provided student loans, and end the prohibition on discharging student loans in bankruptcy for all other student loans ten years after the repayment period begins if a degree is earned and professional certification is obtained in a pre-professional program, and after five years in all other cases. This would provide intergenerational justice to struggling Millenials and Gen Xers and Gen Z. These students could then better afford the American dream and could better afford to get married and have kids.

Poverty

Lots of people, especially children and single parents, but also many older adults with little education or skills, are poor and struggling. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Make the large, per child tax credit, that was available during the pandemic, permanent, and replace the complicated and audit prone earned income tax credit with a simple income tax credit equal to Social Security taxes (for both employers and employees) up to the minimum wage times thirty hours a week (or an equivalent amount of credit against self-employment taxes - reflected in not having those taxes withheld. The usefulness of the child tax credit in reducing child poverty in a simple way was demonstrated in the pandemic, and the EITC is far too complicated and has bad incentives for people trying to climb out of low income jobs and is too expensive to administer. This would make it more affordable for Millennials and Gen Z to marry, have kids, and achieve the American Dream.

What is another big thing that we can do to address that?

Reduce the regular Social Security retirement age to 55 years to people who do not have college degrees, without a reduction in benefits, and pay for any shortfalls in social security from existing obligations or new coverage, by increasing the payroll tax cap by however much is necessary to pay for it. Consider this payback for not imposing higher education costs on the public, and well as a rough justice categorical recognition that jobs that require less education are frequently more physically demanding and harder to continue to perform in late middle age. This would particularly help the Trump demographic. Many people in this demographic are already voting with their feet by leaving the work force and often applying for disability benefits which wouldn't be necessary with this categorical benefit that is much cheaper to administer and has better incentives.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Provide paid maternity leave, at public expense, from six months of pregnancy to fifteen months after birth, as a short form, temporary, Social Security disability benefit. Add an additional six months to this time period for twins. Pay for this as well with an increased payroll tax cap. This greatly reduces the need for infant daycare, and increase the health of mothers and babies especially for working class families without unduly burdening employers. The pandemic proved that not being at work in late pregnancy out of economic necessity increases maternal and infant health. This would make it more affordable for Millennials and Gen Z to marry, have kids, and achieve the American Dream.

Transportation

Internal combustion engines are polluting and make up dependent upon oil. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Reduce trade barriers to importing foreign EVs and batteries, and subsidize high speed charging networks. There are lots of good EVs out there that aren't being exported to the U.S. due to trade barriers, especially from China. EVs reduce pollution and reduce fossil fuel dependency with petroleum dependency creating national security issues.

What is the second biggest thing we can do to address that?

Build dedicated high speed rail in interstate highway corridors where there is high traffic volume on medium distance routes (and upgrade medium speed rail corridors that already exist like the one in the Northeast Corridor), and use that high speed rail not only for passengers but for mail and package delivery by the USPS. Pay for this, in part, by shutting down low speed AMTRAK routes with the heaviest subsidies per passenger-mile. This could reduce pressure to expand highways, is environmentally sound, reduces highway maintenance costs, and provides mutual support between the rail system and the postal system. It would improve speed on these routes relative to both cars and to commercial flights. But it only makes sense where it makes some sort of economic sense based upon cost and demand. Medium distance, high volume routes are the sweet spot for high speed rail. Reducing petroleum dependency in addition to being environmentally and climate sound would increase national security and economic stability by reducing exposure to global oil production shocks.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Convert short haul government fleet vehicles like garbage trucks, intracity and school buses, and urban postal delivery vehicles to EVs. This is a perfect niche for EVs even before charging networks are built out, reducing pollution and reducing oil demand with the benefits described above.

Has The Time Come For A Great Lakes High Speed Rail Line?

When my wife was a summer advertising agency intern in Chicago and I was a law student in Ann Arbor, we actually used the Amtrak service between those cities quite a few times.

The case for a Toronto to Detroit high speed rail line is pretty strong. It would serve a huge share of Canada's entire population with urban centers that are all along a straight line that is flat and manageable to build a high speed rail line on, and Canada is more familiar with the benefit of high speed rail from its stronger connections to Europe.

I'd need to be convinced with more facts that a Detroit to Minneapolis high speed rail line (or parts of it) could be viable and make some kind of economic sense. It might be viable, it might not.

Another route not shown that has been seriously considered for more than thirty year, but never gone anywhere, and wouldn't be too expensive to build (its flat and a lot of the land between the major cities is farmland), would be a Cincinnati-Dayton-Columbus-Cleveland line connecting Ohio's major urban centers. It wouldn't require interstate cooperation, which could make funding it operations and the political process of getting it goin easier (much like high speed rail lines at various stages of development in California, Florida, and Texas). It might give Ohio a much needed economic boost, from construction in the short term, and good transportation infrastructure aggregating the connectively of its major urban centers in the long run. But it is also possible that Ohio's economy has declined so much in the last thirty years that there isn't enough traffic between its major urban centers to support it. Projects in Florida and Texas, however, have at least demonstrated, however, that being a red state isn't an insurmountable political barrier to support for high speed rail.

I do think that the approach of focusing on specific corridors that are either entirely in one state, or in a small number of states in a single region, is a better one than pie-in-the-sky national high speed rail network approaches.

The virtue of focusing on specific corridors also reflects the fact that the sweet spot for high speed rail is medium length trips. 

For long distance travel, the speed of commercial air travel and the lack of a need to maintain expensive infrastructure on the ground between airports through varied terrain with large swaths of low population density, gives commercial air travel a decisive advantage over high speed rail. 

For short distance travel, the high speed doesn't deliver enough of a marginal advantage relative to driving and intracity rail, and having lots of local stops destroys the speed benefits of high speed rail. 

But, for medium length trips of hundreds of miles to several hundred miles, high speed rail can provide significant benefits in speed and comfort over driving, and its ability to deliver passengers all of the way to a city center and its lack of long delays associated with security and checked baggage can give it an edge relative to commercial air travel (and also puts pressure on the commercial air travel system to reduce those delays). Combining it with low volume, high value mail, parcel, and freight service could also tip the balance in favor of high speed rail's economic viability.

The Pacific Coast, improvements in the Northeast Corridor, the connector in place between major Florida cities, planned Texas triangle, and LA to Las Vega routes, for example, do make sense.

I'm ambivalent about Colorado high speed rail proposals. 

In Colorado along I-25, sometimes including cities in Wyoming and New Mexico. I-25 south of Denver is quite fast, and it isn't particularly bogged down north of Denver either. Quality bus service on I-25 could fill the needs that I-25 high speed rail service would fairly well. But construction costs for high speed rail in the I-25 corridor are pretty low since its flat and much of its isn't densely populated. 

The analysis for and against high speed rail along I-70 in Colorado from DIA to Vail or Glenwood Springs is very different. The need for better, faster passenger transportation options there that are less prone to interruption from landslides and weather related accidents is much more clear. But construction costs in the mountains are very high indeed, and much of the demand for high speed rail along I-70 is seasonal.

The U.S. is a big and diverse national geographically and economically. There are many places in the U.S. where the better approach in the intermediate term would be to end Amtrak as a passenger transportation option entirely, in favor of boosting the quality of intercity bus service, and to relegate Amtrak or some other future passenger rail service to a fully private sector, unsubsidized, scenic/mobile tourism destination service that isn't really about getting people from here to there efficiently (something that doesn't require high speed service).

How Urban Are U.S. States?

This map from 2010 shows the percentage of the population of each state that is urban. Some of the results are odds with our intuition. While it isn't a full explanation, a lot of the red state, blue state divide is a rural-urban divide.

This in turn, sheds light on the use of transit in different places in the U.S. The West has lots of empty space. But the places with people in them are often urban and high density.

The Geopolitical Impacts And Timing Of The Decline Of Fossil Fuels

Colorado will not use any coal for electricity generation by 2031. It currently has ten coal fired power plants. It will take three of them off line in 2025. The rest are scheduled to be taken off line in the five years that follow.

Colorado will be more aggressive than most states in this time frame, but some states are already coal free, and almost all states are reducing the extent to which coal powers their electrical grids.

Greatly improved solid state electric vehicle batteries will start coming on line in 2025 and vehicles powered by them will make up a large share of new vehicles by 2031, greatly reducing gasoline and diesel consumption.

These developments, taken together, will greatly reduce U.S. fossil fuel consumption over the next seven years, and the reduction will be particularly dramatic for coal consumption. The falling demand for coal will hit Wyoming and West Virginia hard, because they are the two dominant producers of coal right now in the U.S. (the U.S. imports little, if any, coal). This will also heavily impact freight rail and barge transportation demand, because those are the two main ways that coal is delivered to power plants. Coal is the single largest revenue stream for both means of transportation.

The coal fired power plants are being replaced largely by wind, solar, and natural gas over the next seven years. So, the U.S. is going to see continued strong demand for natural gas, which is mostly sourced from North America, but should be seeing a gradual decline in petroleum demand (a fuel that the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in now, although global oil prices still influence domestic oil prices). The energy self-sufficiency of the U.S., however, buffers it from major macroeconomic shocks driven by rising oil prices like those seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The increase in the share of vehicles that are electric, spurred by solid state batteries, will be global. Indeed, many places in Europe are already in the lead on this front. And, since gasoline and diesel powered vehicles are the predominant end use of oil, this should drive down the price of oil in the global market. This will make high cost oil producers, like fracking wells and off-shore oil rigs, uneconomic first.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine War has put intense pressure on Europe, which has cut off or reduced access to Russian oil and gas, to be more efficient in order to reduce its fossil fuel consumption, to increase it share of renewable power, to delay shutting down coal fired power plants, and to keep its nuclear power plants on line. This may mean more insulation, more blankets and sweaters, more heat pumps, more electric vehicles, a shift to buses and trains, and fewer natural gas power plants.

China is in the way of these developments strongly addressing global warming, because it seems to be increasing, rather than decreasing, its coal consumption in the short to medium term. 

But China is also a world leader in electric car production and in building a high speed rail network, so China may play an important part in reducing global petroleum consumption. And, China's path in electric vehicle development is likely to heavily influence countries in Southeast Asia that in its sphere of influence, and to a lesser extent, may influence Africa and South America in which China has attempted to expand its economic influence.

China is also a leading producer of high efficiency, low cost solar panels, and eventually this, together with its rapidly declining fertility rates and starting to shrink population, may make its current round of investments in coal fired power plants short lived.

As oil demand and prices fall, this will eventually undermine the often authoritarian leaning countries with heavily oil dependent economies, in the Middle East, but also Brunei, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. It will also impact Norway, the U.K., Canada, and U.S. states like Alaska, Louisiana, and Texas that are major oil producers. Oil wealth is what has made ultra-conservative Islam feasible in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It has been central to the economies of Iran and Iraq. It has been an important factor allowing Russia and Venezuela and Iran to continue to be authoritarian.

These countries will see a collapse in their standard of living and they will face intense pressure to convert to a commercial economy. Most of their "guest workers" will be sent home for good.

Amtrak Ridership By Route

By comparison Greyhound served about 25 million passengers in 2023 and commercial airlines served about 369 million passengers.

Why Are Buses And Intracity Rail In The U.S. So Crime Ridden?

The biggest reason for low bus and intracity rail usage in the United States by international standards is that crime in and around transit is high and these means of transportation don't feel safe. It is a long standing issue, and it isn't nearly such a serious problem in countries all of the world. 

Israelis, for example, packed buses in the course of living their every day lives, even when suicide bombers were terrorizing those buses.

A recent Denver Post story quantifies and characterizes the problem in Denver's transit system.

When Denver resident Jana Angelo rides the Regional Transportation District’s buses and trains, she feels trapped and says she sometimes hugs herself for fortitude.

She’s smelled fumes from passengers smoking fentanyl. She’s heard unhinged riders’ rants. Two “really high” men once fought right in front of her, said Angelo, 29.

“I was like, ‘Stop the bus!’ ” she said. “But the driver did not.”

Angelo packs a knife just in case, she said, and wears headphones, avoiding conversation. . . .

Passengers on RTD’s buses and trains were assaulted or threatened at the rate of one per day over the last three years, according to agency records obtained by The Denver Post. RTD drivers also are assaulted regularly — more than 100 times a year on average since 2019, records show — as they work amid crime and antisocial behavior, including riders using illegal drugs and unhoused people who sleep in station elevators and on climate-controlled buses and trains. 

. . .

The agency’s general manager, Debra Johnson, acknowledged the problems and said ensuring safety is critical. She’s discussed rising violence and crime in public transit with her counterparts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

“We’re all adversely impacted by the same elements of society,” Johnson said in an interview, referring to mental health problems, substance use and homelessness. “These are societal issues. Whatever’s happening in a municipality is going to spill over into the transit system. What are we collectively doing to help minimize and mitigate these societal issues?” 

. . .

RTD bus driver Dan Day, 43, recalled how, on a cold day in 2020 during his first year on the job, he saw a man down, bleeding from his head, while another man kicked him at the Decatur Station along Federal Boulevard.

Day took the bleeding man onto the bus and handed him paper towels. As he steered the bus around the station, the attacker approached it, pointing a gun. He climbed on, aiming the barrel at the bleeding man. Day was caught between them, learned it was a dispute about a sister, and brokered a truce.

“I had a sense he wouldn’t shoot,” Day said. “…I was just trying to follow procedure, to call dispatch, let them know what happened.”

RTD supervisors offered him therapeutic counseling. He declined, turning instead to classic stoic philosophers: “My own tools to just cope with scary and difficult situations,” Day said. “Keep yourself in the moment. This is just a moment in time. It is going to pass.” 

. . .

RTD bus drivers and train operators were physically assaulted 463 times between January 2019 and April 2024 — a rate of roughly seven assaults per month, according to the records obtained by The Post through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

In addition, drivers have reported 501 verbal assaults and threats of violence since 2021 — a dozen per month on average, the records show.

Assaults and threats targeting RTD passengers happen more often, according to the records. Since January 2021, 1,375 passengers have experienced physical assaults and verbal threats along bus and rail routes, records show. That’s an average of 34 a month over the past three years.

The troubles appear concentrated along busy streets including Colfax Avenue, Broadway and Federal Boulevard.

RTD’s transit police have been busy. The agency’s tallies show that, during the first half of 2023, transit officers made a monthly average of 36 arrests. They responded to a monthly average of 60 assaults, 486 disturbances, 1,206 drug-related incidents, 389 trespasses and 58 instances of vandalism, according to an agency document.

This year, a homicide on an RTD bus in west Denver heightened concerns. A 13-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting on Jan. 27 of a 60-year-old grandfather whose leg was blocking an RTD bus aisle.

Illegal drug use happens almost daily, drivers and train operators say. 

. . .

Light rail operator Roy Martinez, who previously worked as a bus driver and endured assaults, said he regularly smells illegal drugs on light-rail trains such as the E Line that connects downtown Denver with the south suburbs.

Typically, a rider places a fentanyl pill on a piece of foil and crushes it. Then the rider lights the powder and, hunkering under a hood or blanket, inhales the fumes.

Those fumes rise and spread through the train’s air system, Martinez said, noting he detects odors inside the locked front cabin where he runs the train. There’s no option but to push through to the next stop. “Then you stop the train, open the doors, air it out,” he said.

From the Denver Post.

The story presents a mix of questions and answers, some tucked away behind the scenes.

One obvious issue is that the U.S. has a weak social safety net, and the highest percentage of people who drive their own cars, if their licenses aren't revoked, and don't use transit. Transit is disproportionately left with people who are too disabled to drive, people whose licenses have been revoked, and people who are very poor. Even people without licenses who have money often ride share instead.

So, transit is heavily weighted with very poor people and is not well counter-balanced, most of the time, with middle class and more affluent people. It is also heavily weighted with people who have lost driver's licenses due to illegal conduct and substance abuse.

Big cities in the U.S. with transit systems also tend to have riders who lack social cohesion that can impose order through nearly universally held social norms, in lieu of formal law enforcement.

But another issue is that policy makers and people who talk about policy and involved in politics, like me, struggle to understand why people who act in anti-social ways in and around transit are acting the way that they do.

I can completely understand why someone might become addicted to smoking fentanyl. But I can't fathom at all why someone would feel like this is an activity that makes sense to engage in while riding a bus or a light rail train.

I'm comfortable trusting that Debra Johnson, the general manager of Denver's Regional Transportation District has a better handle on what's going on that I do. She blames mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness.

In other words, mentally ill and homeless drug users tend to use drugs on buses and train cars because that's more comfortable than doing it on the streets, under a bridge, or in an alley.

Public libraries, which are one of the few places you can just hang out without paying money, in a place shielded from the weather, face similar problems, although seemingly, fewer violent assaults.

Anecdotally, at least, the assaults seem to be driven by poor people with a lack of an ability to control anger and impulse, and a lack of access in terms of both personal social skills and formal access to other recourse to resolve situations where they feel aggrieved. 

It isn't that working class and middle class people don't often do some of the same things. But they don't do that at bus stops, on buses, and on light rail trains. Driving a car reduces the amount of potentially triggering interactions you have with other people, although even that doesn't stop road rage incidents.

These situations on transit and in urban neighborhoods are something that urban people can't ignore, which is one of the reasons that urban people tend to be more liberal.

The whole situation is also an apt example of what makes illegal drugs a problem that we have invoked the criminal justice system to address, even if it has done a very poor job of it. Most vices, including illegal drug use, are primarily a problem because they are instrumental in creating a "bad neighborhood." 

If drug users were out of sight in an opium den somewhere, and didn't bother everyone else, we'd care less. And, modern opium dens might even be equipped to deal with overdoses and other forms of drug induced anti-social behavior.

Improving Government

Government has a mix of problems. Sometimes it regulates too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it owns too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it is just operated in the wrong way. This post is a grab bag of ideas about improving it.

* Sidewalks should be publicly owned and maintained. Individual responsibility of property owners for this doesn't work because low rates of non-maintenance (including lack of prompt snow removal) makes the network of sidewalks much less valuable.

* Bicycles should usually not share roads with cars and trucks. They should use sidewalks or dedicated, protected bike paths and lanes.

* Amtrak has failed and should be shut down outside the Northeast Corridor.

* The U.S. Postal System worked well for a long time, but in the era of widespread parcel delivery services and e-mails and texts, it no longer does. Strong Veteran's preferences and higher pay than private sector equivalents don't justify it. Free mail for incumbents in Congress don't justify it. Delivering junk mail is not a good enough reason for a massive public enterprise. Fewer and fewer letters of significance are delivered that way. Money orders are no longer economically important and can be provided by private commercial banks and money services. Subsidizing rural living isn't a good reason for it.

* Occupational licensing is required when it shouldn't be. When it is required, requirements like a lack of a criminal record are often inappropriate for people who have been non-recidivist for a long enough time (about five to seven years) when the risk of future crime fades to the background level. Worse yet is construction trade licensing at the local level when it should be at the state level, fostering a high level of non-compliance. Independent legal para-professions should be allowed much more liberally, although licensing that might be appropriate. There should be a common database of licensing discipline since many disqualifying acts for one profession should also apply to others.

* Zoning and land use regulation should be dramatically paired back and places like Colorado finally realize that this is true and driving high housing prices. Deregulating is better than mandating affordable housing or rent control. Development fees to mitigate externalities of government costs caused by development, however, make sense. 

* Involuntary landmark designation is almost always a bad idea and an unfunded mandate. If it is important enough historically to preserve the government should buy it and rent it.

* Building codes are critical and non-compliance with permit requirements is far too high. But building codes are also too restrictive and the processing of building permits is much too slow. A system of private building code compliance auditors similar to the CPA system might be better.

* We should do a better job of discouraging people from building disaster prone housing in flood zones, fire zones and other "stupid zones".

* We should do a better job of encouraging off site manufacturing of buildings and large building modules.

* Property taxes are a decent way to finance local government (and shouldn't exempt non-profits and governments other than the one imposing them) but are a bad way to finance public K-12 education which is the main way that they are used now.

* Electing coroners, treasurers, clerks, surveyors, secretaries of state, engineers, and judges (even in routine judicial retention elections) is a horrible idea.

* Electing sheriffs and district attorneys and attorneys-general isn't as horrible an idea, but is still a worse idea than having elected officials appoint them, directly or indirectly.

* State and local school and college boards would be better not elected by the general public. Local school boards should be elected by student's parents. College boards could be elected by alumni or appointed by the elected official who make their funding decisions. State school boards should be appointed by the state officials who fund state K-12 education.

* Shorter ballots are better. In the England, there is one nation election in which you vote for a single legislator on a partisan ballot in a single district, irregularly, but not less than every five years absent a world war, for a government that does everything that the state and federal governments do in the U.S., with no primary elections since parties nominate their own candidates internally, and there is one set of partisan local council elections for one or two posts, and there are few referenda a lifetime, and they are democratic enough, despite having a monarchy and a house of lords. Very modest public electoral input is enough.

* I don't favor a system quite as simple as England's. But we should still have much shorter ballots.

* Rare recall elections make sense for officials who serve longer terms and perhaps for judges and other public officials who are now elected but shouldn't be.

* State constitutions and local charters should have less detail and so that changes to them should be things that require voter approval and not housekeeping measures.

* Some referenda on tax and debt issues is appropriate, but Colorado, with TABOR overdoes it. New taxes, and not new revenues from existing taxes, should get public votes. Maybe bond issues that commit a government to substantial tax obligations from general revenues but not renewals of them.

* Citizen initiatives have their place in overcoming systemic flaws in the legislative system and making elections interesting to voters. But it should be a bit harder and more structured and generally should avoid spending and taxing decisions that need to be made globally.

* Colorado mostly does the probate process right, although probate procedure could use more structure. Most states make the process too intrusive.

* When there is a single post in a candidate election, dispensing with primaries, having a majority to win requirement, and having runoff elections would be preferable to first past the post elections and to instant runoff elections.

* There would be merit to electing state legislatures and state congressional delegations by proportional representation.

* There would be merit to making state legislatures unicameral.

* The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a direct popular vote.

* The franchise should be expanded. The voting age should be reduced to sixteen. Non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Felons, even felons in prison, should be allowed to vote (in their pre-incarceration place of incarceration).

* HOAs are horrible but sometimes necessary institutions. They should be abolished or replaced where possible, and be restructured with fewer powers and less discretion where not possible. HOA covenants are routinely unreasonably restrictive.

* Municipal ordinances related to zoning and land use should have fines or other civil penalties, not criminal penalties.

* Arbitration on the U.S. model is usually a bad idea and should be banned in many circumstances.

* We should have a more pro-active way of intervening in cases where people are mentally ill or cognitively impaired, and the system for adjudicating these cases is too cumbersome.

* Single judges should not handle parenting time and parental responsibilities cases, and the best interests of the child standard should have more detailed substances to guide it. Alimony should also be less discretionary.

* There should be a right to counsel in all cases involving "persons" such as child custody cases, protective proceedings, and immigration cases.

* Forum shopping in the federal courts needs to be better restrained, and allowing a single forum shopped judge to issue national injunctions is problematic.

* After some rocky starts, regulation and technical private management of junk faxes, junk telephone calls, and even junk email has made some real progress. Social media junk is less well regulated.

* Privacy regulation often does more harm than good. Juvenile justice privacy does more harm than good in most cases, educational privacy goes too far, and Europe's GDPR goes too far. Secrecy around ownership of closely held companies is too great and the exception under the Corporate Transparency Act is far too complicated. There are places for privacy regulation but it needs to be cut way back. Secrets are often harmful in hard to quantify ways.

* Cryptocurrency serves few, if any, legitimate purposes, is an environmental disaster, and should be discouraged.

* Programs to help the poor need to have much less paperwork and red tape; means testing is rarely a good choice unless it is integrated into the tax system.

* Some tax credits for poor and middle income people, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Obamacare insurance premium subsidies, are far too complicated.

* State and local government funded free wi-fi for all would make lots of sense.

* There is a logic to allowing vouchers for religious private K-12 schools, but on balance it does too much to support religious institutions at public expense. Charter schools, i.e. public schools with autonomy from school boards, are a better approach. School choice of some kind does make sense among public ordinary and charter schools, ideally, statewide, rather than only within a school district.

* Boarding schools attached to high schools in more urban areas would be a better alternative to highly subsidized tiny rural high schools.

* We do a horrible job of managing the business of health care. The requirement that doctors be the sole owners of medical practices also forces them into being small business owners when they are ill suited to that part of their jobs and leads to bad systems and poor health care administration and bad financing arrangements. Almost every other country, in many varied models, does a better job. The current system results in overpaid health care providers (doctors, nurses, drug companies, medical equipment companies, private hospital system owners, etc.), for inferior results. Our drug prices and medical equipment prices and ambulance prices and ER prices are all vastly higher than in other countries and this isn't mostly driven by private pay medical education or medical malpractice lawsuits.

* We need to create more medical school slots. We have too few doctors and are compensating for that with too many senior paraprofessionals like nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and midwives. We should also allow more non-M.D.'s to provide the care that psychiatrists do since the knowledge base for psychiatrists doesn't overlap heavily with that of M.D.'s and where it does overlap can be taught separately.

* The substance of pass-through taxation in taxing closely held business income once at roughly individual tax rates while allowing limited liability, is good, but the actual pass-through tax mechanism is not. Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code is not a good approach for taxing closely held limited liability entities, it complexity, it phantom income, and more don't work well. A double taxation reducing or limiting variation on the C-corporation model would be much better.

* We do a poor job of taxing hot assets in international taxation.

* We lack adequate guidance for remote worker labor and tax regulation, and haven't updated our laws adequately to reflect the era of independent contractors.

* We over regulate many prescription drugs and under regulate supplements and herbal remedies and the like. Homeopathic remedies and other supplements need to be regulated more like drugs. Prescription drug approval when approved elsewhere should be easier. Prescription approval for experimental drugs for the terminally ill, or in a pandemic, should be easier. More non-abuse prone prescription drugs should be available over the counter or with pharmacist approval.

* Prostitution should be decriminalized or legalized to a greater extent.

* We vastly under-regulate firearms and explosives and military equipment.

* We do a poor job of commercial air travel security, imposing too much of a burden and delay for too little benefit in a security theater way, at an excessive cost and a greatly excessive externality cost. We also do a crap job of managing luggage charges and checked luggage, and we are more inefficient than we need to be in how quickly commercial aircraft are loaded and unloaded.

* Uber, etc. revealed that we over-regulate taxis, but that we do need some regulation to assure riders are safe from dangerous or dangerous to them drivers.

* Buses and intracity rail won't thrive until we make them feel safer and comfortable.

* Public energy utilities do mostly a good job, except in Texas which opted out of the national energy grid.

* Clean water and good sewage treatment should be expanded urgently to places like Indian Reservations and Flint, Michigan.

* To better disentangle church and state, the charitable income tax deduction (but not the gift and estate tax deduction) for contributions to religious organizations (but not the tax exemption for churches) should end, the parsonage exemption should end, the property tax and sale tax exemptions for churches should end, the investment income of churches should be taxed as a corporation, and the ban on politics by churches should end.

* There should be more power to compel road maintenance below some standard.

* There should be a power to compel HOAs to do their jobs for all members, similar to landlord-tenant maintenance claims.