NHPR and the Infrastructure

There was a somewhat confused young lady on NHPR this morning emoting over the terrible state of American "infrastructure". She never defined this somewhat nebulous term, but from context I believe she was talking about roads, railroads, and airways. She was convinced that the "infrastructure" was in terrible shape and needed massive amounts of work. Well paid work naturally.
Do I believe this? I drove to DC in May and Brooklyn in August. The interstates were all open, smoothly paved, and except where construction was occurring, in great shape.
Then she moved on to rail. The country desperately needs "high speed rail", and trains are so green because they are electrically powered. Two whoppers for the price of one. We already have high speed rail running from Boston to Washington. That's the only US route where high speed rail is competitive with flying. The East coast cities are close together and the train can match airline time. Most other US city pairs are so far apart that everybody flies. The second whopper concerns the electric power bit. Actually, nearly all trains are pulled by diesel locomotives. Only on the most heavily traveled routes does it pay to install the costly overhead wire needed for electric locomotives.
For closers, she must have been exposed to the sales pitch from the "NextGen" air traffic control system vendors. She claimed that "Nextgen" would save much jet fuel from better routing of airliners.
Not so. Nextgen would enrich a number of equipment suppliers but would have little effect on air traffic. Nextgen would replace the current ground radar system with GPS. Aircraft would all carry GPS equipment and the onboard GPS would radio the plane's position to air traffic control. GPS is accurate to tens of feet where as ground radar is only accurate to a couple of miles. However the couple of mile accuracy of radar is plenty good enough to avoid mid air collisions. The greater accuracy of GPS doesn't really do anything that needs doing. It takes the same amount of fuel to cover the distance no matter how accurately air traffic control knows the position of the plane in the air.