The entirety of Europe had the industrial capacity and know-how to transition towards both High Speed Rail and entire light rail system in the 80’s and 90’s, even after the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. It’s honestly shocking that they didn’t given the seriousness that the 80’s oil crisis caused, but I have to assume at this point they were banking on the balkanization of Russia and were basically doing a test run in the former Yugoslavia.
The problem is that the whole of elite European liberal intellectualism is completely wound up in essentially emulating what they perceive to be “American freedom”, you’ll still run into this with exchange students all the time. The problem is that ‘American freedom’ will ultimately completely destroy your infrastructural integrity and thus degrade your industrial capacity.
