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Still, there’s a price to pay for disorganization—in the case of high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor, that price could be a hundred billion dollars.

That’s important to understanding how Levy, the mathematics Ph.D. at New York University’s Transit Costs Project, figured out how we can fix the Northeast Corridor and deliver world-class transportation to the 50 million residents of America’s biggest megaregion.

Upgrading the Northeast Corridor, the train tracks that run from Boston to Washington by way of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, with spurs to neighboring cities, has been the longtime dream of the region’s leaders and planners at Amtrak, which runs the intercity trains.

According to the Transit Costs Project, more than 20 percent of travel time on the Northeast Corridor is “padding”—as anyone who has endured the 15-minute break in the bowels of Penn Station can understand—compared with 7 percent on well-run systems in Europe.

Later this year it is due to enter 28 new 160mph NextGen Acela trains into service on its Northeast Corridor route between Boston and Washington DC.