WASHINGTON — A new study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for Transportation Attitudes found that 64% of American adults believe domestic passenger trains “should figure out the floating thing already,” with majorities across all age groups, political affiliations, and income brackets expressing what researchers described as “a vague but extremely confident frustration with the trains continuing to touch the ground.”
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The study, which surveyed 2,847 Americans over a six-week period, asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement: American passenger trains should figure out the floating thing already, like the ones in Japan or wherever. A near-supermajority agreed. Of those, 71% described themselves as “strongly agreeing.” A further 12% checked an option that was not provided on the survey form, writing in: yes obviously.
Only 4% of respondents disagreed. Of those, half clarified, in follow-up interviews, that they had simply misread the question.
“What we’re seeing here is what we’d call a high-confidence, low-information consensus,” said Dr. Marcus Aldwin, the lead researcher on the project. “Americans have, somewhere along the line, absorbed the impression that trains in other countries float, that this is good, that we should also have it, and that the reason we don’t already have it is essentially a failure of will. They cannot, in any meaningful sense, explain what they are talking about. But they want it. They want it badly. They want it now.”
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The technology in question — magnetic levitation, or maglev — is real, exists in limited deployment in Japan, China, and South Korea, and uses powerful electromagnets to suspend a train roughly four inches above a specialized guideway, eliminating wheel friction and allowing for very high speeds. Construction costs run between $40 million and $200 million per mile of track, depending on terrain. The United States has zero miles of operational maglev infrastructure.
These details, study respondents indicated, were not their problem.
“I just feel like at this point, with everything we have, the trains should be floating,” said Cassandra Ortiz, 34, a respondent reached for follow-up in Phoenix. “I don’t know what’s going on with the trains, exactly. I haven’t been on one in maybe twelve years. But I just feel like — come on. Look at us. Look at what we can do. We have, like, AI. We have, like, the Apple Vision Pro. And the trains are still on the ground? Like normal trains? In 2025?“
Asked whether she would use a floating train if one were built, Ortiz paused.
“Probably not,” she said. “I’d fly. Or drive. But it should exist. It’s the principle.”
Ortiz’s response, researchers noted, was statistically representative. The study found that of respondents who supported floating trains, only 9% indicated they would personally ride one. Of those 9%, the most commonly cited reason was “to see what it’s like.” The second most commonly cited reason was “Instagram.”
The disconnect between expressed support and actual ridership has long puzzled domestic transportation policy researchers, but Dr. Aldwin’s team believes their data point to a coherent if unconventional explanation.
“Americans don’t want to use a floating train,” he said. “Americans want to have a floating train. They want to know that the floating train is out there. They want to drive past the floating train on the interstate and feel that the country is, in some indefinable way, on the right track. That’s the technical phrase we use in the report. On the right track. We considered other phrasings. We landed on that one.”
Public officials, when asked to respond to the survey, expressed varying degrees of professional patience.
“We have been trying to fund basic Amtrak rail repair for forty years,” said one senior Department of Transportation official, speaking on background because she did not wish to be quoted by name screaming. “Forty years. We cannot keep the existing rails level. We cannot get the bridges inspected. There is a tunnel under the Hudson River that was built when Theodore Roosevelt was president and that will, statistically, collapse during a future presidential administration we have not yet elected. And the American people would like the trains to float.”
She paused.
“I would like the trains to float, too,” she added quietly. “I would like a lot of things.”
The study also revealed several adjacent attitudes that researchers found striking. A majority of respondents (58%) believed that the United States had, at some point, possessed floating-train technology and lost it. A significant minority (22%) believed that floating trains were, in fact, already operational in California, Texas, or “one of the ones near Boston,” and were simply not yet available in their region. A smaller but persistent group (7%) believed that floating-train technology had been suppressed by an unspecified entity, most commonly identified as “the airlines,” “Big Asphalt,” or “the same people who killed the electric car, you know who I mean.”
When this final group was asked to identify who they meant, none could.
A separate question on the survey asked respondents to estimate the cost of constructing a national floating-train network. The mean response was $14 billion. The actual figure, per Federal Railroad Administration estimates of even a partial East Coast maglev corridor, exceeds $2 trillion.
Asked to react to this discrepancy, respondent Jeremy Polk, 47, of suburban Atlanta, said: “Two trillion sounds high. I’d do it for, like, fifteen. Maybe twenty. Cap it at twenty.”
Polk has no background in civil engineering, public finance, or rail construction. He drives a 2019 Toyota 4Runner. He has not been on a train since 2008.
The findings come at a moment of broader American transportation discontent, with separate Pew data indicating that 73% of Americans believe domestic flights have gotten worse in the past five years, 68% believe their local roads are deteriorating, and 81% believe traffic is significantly worse than it used to be. None of these data points, researchers noted, are connected in respondents’ minds to any specific underlying cause, set of policy decisions, or willingness to pay additional taxes.
“Americans hold what we’d call a consumer relationship with infrastructure,” Dr. Aldwin explained. “They feel they have purchased a country. They feel the country is, in some respects, not delivering. They would like the country to deliver better. They are not, on the whole, interested in the supply chain.”
Asked whether his team had any policy recommendations based on the floating-train findings, Dr. Aldwin laughed for several seconds before composing himself.
“No,” he said. “No, we do not have policy recommendations. We have data. The data says Americans want trains to float. The data does not say how. The data does not say where. The data does not say who is going to pay for it. The data is a vibe. We are presenting the vibe.”
He paused.
“The vibe is: float.”
A spokesperson for Amtrak, contacted for comment on the survey, declined to provide one in any structured form, but did forward, via email, a single attachment titled please.pdf, which on opening was a 47-page document containing photographs of decaying rail infrastructure, deferred maintenance reports dating to the Reagan administration, and a final page reading only: we are doing our best.
The full Pew report, titled Floating Trains and the American Imagination, will be released next month. An accompanying podcast series, Why Don’t Our Trains Float Yet, is reportedly already in development at three separate major media outlets, none of which have, at any point in their reporting, included an interview with a working civil engineer.
At press time, 64% of Americans continued to believe that domestic trains should be floating, that the technology to make them float was readily available, and that the only thing standing between them and a network of magnetically levitated coast-to-coast bullet trains was, in the words of one survey respondent, “you know, just somebody really wanting it.”
Somebody, the survey did not say, did want it. Somebody, the survey did not say, has wanted it for forty years. Somebody, the survey did not say, is sitting in an office in Washington right now, looking at a tunnel under the Hudson, and trying very hard not to cry.