“Imagine boarding a train in the middle of a city,” former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over a hundred miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.”
It’s a curious statement to find one-third of the way into a book titled Abundance. Not 10% of Americans live or work in the middle of a city within walking distance of a passenger train station, but, as coauthors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson quickly make clear, their focus is on “the land that matters … in the hearts of our cities,” by which they mean the giant coastal metropolitan areas where one-quarter of the public live.
They make it clear as well that…
