Long-haul passenger rail has a role (I was with Amtrak for 11 years), but it's not a starring one. Trains carried 95% of US intercity traffic in 1910, but that's like saying the Apple II handled 70% of all spreadsheet transactions--there wasn't that much intercity traffic in a mainly rural country, and there was virtually no alternative for trips over 400 miles.

Suburban sprawl will have to end. Regional (<500 miles) and commuter rail may increase, though the denser the area, the more bitter right-of-way and infrastructure fights will be. (I wonder if in the meantime airlines will experiment with "quiet flights," the way Amtrak has no-cell-phone quiet cars in the Northeast Corridor?)

I revisited the TED talk, then saw this one by Stewart Brand--not a refutation of Kunstler's indignation, but a different angle. I hadn't thought of squatter cities as sources of productivity.