Nice to hear that. It was not obvious from your postings.
>
> What I hate is people who whine that "it's better in Europe" and only
> can talk about how Greyhound smells like urine.
As a matter of fact, Greyhound and affiliated companies buses do smell of urine when their toilets are not maintained properly. Been there, smelled that. They also run a very lousy and unreliable service - again, based on my personal observation.
As to the "better in Europe" trope - it depends where you live. If you compare New York to a European Podunk - you will get the inequality running one way, but if you compare a US Podunk or even a relatively large size city like Baltimore to a city of a comparable size in Europe, I am afraid the inequality will run in the reverse direction. You can see it with your very own eyes, whereas to believe in the US superiority, you would need to first read that in a paper.
More importantly, however, I believe that myself and others on this list who compared US institutions to their counterparts elsewhere never claimed that "it is better in Europe" - all that I (and I presume others) argue is that it is less expensive and more equitable while the quality is on average about the same.
I think it is a very important point because it contradicts the advertised claim of the US-style capitalism of being more efficient, albeit not more equitable. If we do a comparison right it is clear that it is neither more efficient nor more equitable. Trying to portray this critique as "it is better elsewhere" is not only a misrepresentation, but actually a red herring from a very powerful form of critique that US institutions do not meet even their own advertised standards.
While we are that, let me settle an old score. You never replied to my argument that if geography were a factor, we would have decent public transit in places where geography permits it. So let me add another one - geography is far more important in freight rail than in passenger rail, because passenger trains can negotiate much steeper grades than the freight trains can. This why TGV was build as an exclusively passenger line - to save money on grading that would have been required had freight trains were to share the tracks. So even in a mountainous area building a fast passenger train line (equivalent of German ICE that travels at 240 km/h or 150 mph would be no more challenging and probably less expensive than building an interstate highway.
If you are interested in an alternative an more convincing imho explanation, I think that transportation is one of the two area (the other one being the land use) that reflect and reproduce institutional racism and apartheid in the United States. While most other institutions from schools to employment and to law enforcement and courts underwent some degree of integration (although disparities still remain) - transportation remains one of the most racially segregated institutions in the United States (as for example reflected in Baltimore suburbanites calling the light rail system in this city the "dark rail.").
It is difficult to deny that apartheid is the major factor explaining the poor state of public transit in the US (and the proliferation of suburban sprawl) and remain rational at the same time. Thus, Greyhound services are of such poor quality because they serve predominantly dark-skinned population. The quality of commuter bus services for white suburbanites (cf. NJ transit) is of considerably better quality. The same can be said of Maryland MTA services for suburban commuters and Baltimore residents.
I can go by pointing out that poor public transit is a major obstacle for the poor and dark skinned people to find employment - because jobs migrate to suburbs (as it can be easily demonstrated by BLS stats, see for example my forthcoming piece in Monthly Labor Review) and the urban poor lack the transportation to reliably commute there. I believe Barbara Ehrenreich raises a similar point in her 'Nickel and dimed.'
I would go as far as saying that anyone who is seriously concerned with dismantling the lingering apartheid in the United States should start with changing public transportation from being a "dark rail" to a system serving all segments of the US society (as it does in NYC).
Wojtek