The biggest obstacle to doing mass transit right is the cost. And the cost is high. There’s just no way around it. A well-done mass transit line is expensive. But it really is worth underscoring the point that these are the kind of expenditures that pay off. They’re not worth doing because they’re cheap, they’re worth doing because they’re really valuable. In the DC area, we have a great example of the difference as the Orange Line goes out in Virginia. In distant Fairfax County they built Metro on the cheap, in the I-66 median, and wound up with what amount to park-and-ride venues for a commuter rail network. That’s a useful asset for the county, but it’s nothing compared to what they got in Arlington County where they buried Metro beneath Wilson Boulevard and built a series of relatively close-packed stations, creating an extended corridor of walkable neighborhoods.

Dave Alpert explains that “Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor covers only 7.6% of the county’s land area, but generated 33% of its tax revenue.” Impressive. And note that nobody who’s not insane ever walks around New York City and says it’s too bad that they wasted all this money building the Subway.

Barack Obama’s visit to Cairo seems to be sparking a depressing quantity of nonsense criticism, but I think real questions are hanging over the long-run import of this kind of outreach. In that spirit, I would add my voice to what Matt Duss says here and what Michael Cohen and Brian Katulis say here, namely that a meaningful dialogue with the population in Egypt and neighboring countries requires a willingness to engage with the Islamist political movements that are, in most such places, the main source of political opposition.

It would be nice to think that we could cook up a nice crew of friendly, western-style, market-oriented, Israeli-loving, secularist Arabs to take the reigns of power in Arab capitals and spread the gospel of democracy. But you have to deal with societies as they actually exist, and in Egypt that means a society with a large and influential Muslim Brotherhood. The aim should be to move toward a healthier bilateral relationship, where the United States is not involved with actively propping up unpopular regimes or trying to micromanage the domestic politics of foreign countries.

Back during the campaign, Barack Obama’s “naive and irresponsible” pledge to engage in constructive diplomacy with “bad guy” nations was primarily debated in terms of Iran. So far, however, it seems to be having its greatest impact in Latin America. I’ve written previously about the infamous handshake with Hugo Chavez and earlier this week the US and Cuba agreed to resume talks on migration and postal issues. Now it seems that the Organization of American States is getting ready to reinvite Cuba to join the organization, another important step toward moving beyond the Cold War in Latin America.

Obviously, a lot of substantive issues remain, including the main elements of the US-backed embargo of Cuba and the continuing Castro-run dictatorship on the island. But we seem to have gotten to a point where both sides are trying to improve the relationship, rather than looking for pretexts over which to fight. And that’s a good thing.

There seem to me to be two noteworthy things in the letter to Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus from Barack Obama that the White House just dunked into my inbox. One is that the President continues to push for a public option, writing “I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans.” A little while back, I think it was generally thought that the public option was largely a kind of kabuki bargaining tactic, but people are now putting serious political muscle behind it. A slightly duller, but in some respects more important, aspect of the letter is this idea:

To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress Under this approach, MedPAC’s recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

Ezra Klein explains some of the import of this. But to make a long story short, this MedPAC idea is part of closing the gap between the cost savings we “could” achieve through reform and actually achieving cost savings. MedPAC is basically an expert committee that comes up with smart recommendations on Medicare payments that it offers to congress. But then Congress doesn’t actually do anything. What they’re looking to do here is to change the decision-process so as to make it much more likely that MedPAC’s ideas would be implemented, by shifting to a BRAC model whereby congress could block the recommendations as a whole but couldn’t modify them or kill the whole process with delay.

As the main characteristic of the American political system is status quo bias, these kind of changes to the default rules can have a big impact. This seems like a very smart ideas.