Thinking about the Abundance Agenda at 185 mph
I am fortunate to be in Europe for a couple of weeks. It’s always striking to see the quality of public infrastructure here. The Paris Metro is a marvel—beautiful, fast, and extensive. (Why the Metro operates so much better than the NYC Subway, given its smaller operating budget, is a story for another time.)
This morning, I took the Metro to one of Paris’s several grand train stations, Gare du Nord, and boarded the Eurostar train to Antwerp via Brussels, where I am sitting right now. Even in second class, the train car was comfortable, quiet, and very well-maintained. Traveling at speeds as high as 185 mph (a speed that American trains only dream about), we completed the 164-mile segment to Brussels in about an hour and 20 minutes.
Why can’t we have this in US?
More specifically:
Why did California and the US government spend tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail project that doesn’t seem likely to carry passengers for at least a decade, if ever, and will launch in the agricultural Central Valley rather than the busy L.A. to San Francisco route along the coast?
Why don’t we build nearly enough housing, and why is the housing we do build ridiculously expensive?
For over a decade, I have been telling my fellow progressives that Democrats must walk their talk and deliver results. You can’t just talk about the need for affordable housing; you have to build it. You can’t just talk about the environmental and other benefits of high-speed rail; you have to deliver it. Mostly, I’ve been shouting into the wind. Until now.
This is the Abundance Moment, by which I am referring to the new book Abundance by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic (review here) and several books in the same vein that have come out around the same time (e.g,. Why Nothing Works and Stuck). These writers seek to explain why it has become so hard to build things in so many places in America.
Of course, Republicans are often not on board with progressive priorities, but when it comes to building things, as Klein and Thompson point out, you often have to go to Georgia and Texas to see your Illinois and New York values living in the world. Even when Democrats have passed huge infrastructure bills, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, it takes years before shovels hit the ground.
It does not have to be that way, as these books describe in detail. Nor does moving on from this morass require abandoning progressive values, as the European example demonstrates.
I am pleased that younger progressives are leading on this issue and have been aggressively pushing the Democratic Party to adopt an Abundance Agenda. I fully support organizations like YIMBY Democrats for America. (Not familiar with YIMBY? See here.) I encourage those who feel the same to check them out, including their related podcast, Radio Abundance.
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