This whole thing is a deceptively written op-ed and the Cato Institute is full of talentless clowns groveling to the oil tycoons that fund them, but the headline isn’t technically wrong. It just overlooks the unholy amounts of money we burn to make those things true. https://twitter.com/CatoInstitute/status/1361139933105303552

Airlines would not exist as a commercial entity without enormous government subsidies, frequent bailouts and generations of regulatory capture. Under strict libertarian free market principles the entire industry would have been an ash heap decades ago.

Driving is more convenient because the government, for a number of historical reasons, has spent over 70 years and untold trillions of dollars to make that happen, from the construction and maintenance of vast inter-urban freeway projects right down to city minimum parking regs.

Trains didn’t suffer in the US because they lost some free market game of wits and talent, or were superseded by other technologies. They suffered because auto manufactures, the aerospace industry and oil companies paid bigger bribes.

So we leave the entire passenger rail system to grow more broken down and anemic year after year, but rebuild all the freeway cloverleafs every decade or so and pretend driving is basically free.

And every few years a bunch of libertarian half-wits pretend that should be the natural order of things because trains seem too European.