Eric Goldwyn on Transit Costs in the U.S.

That is not the way to go about planning something, NYU’s Goldwyn said. “You don’t start with, well what are all the problems I need to fix?” He said the Northeast Corridor’s approach amounts to “I have all these problems, and yeah, if I connect Boston and New York in a faster amount of time, that’s secondary.” Goldwyn said the better approach is to do what the Japanese do: “You start with what are the two things I’m trying to connect? And then: What is service going to look like? Is it every hour? What speed? And then you pick your technology.” This is also how projects are generally planned in Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere in Europe.