Well, honestly, it all seemed rather incidental. Living in Germany: I think you can find a broken escalator at some subway station in town at any given moment. These things just break every now and then (or are turned off or whatever). Having poor telephone reception on trains is also not unusual here, since trains tend to go through the middle of nowhere. And the quality of pavement varies from street to street here. I guess he might have a point that the US doesn't have any high speed rails, but that is probably because they started with a very good network of airports, because their cities tend to be a bit further apart* and because the rest of their infrastructure is just more built towards car+planes instead of public transport (many large, low density cities).
* NY - Boston and NY - Washington are both 300 km, I guess the only lines that might make sense are NY - Philly - Washington, the Austin - Houston - Dallas triangle, LA - San Diego, Seattle - Vancouver, but these are all in the 200-300 km range. Few of these lines would make sense without good secondary rail/public transport to connect them further. On the other hand, Germany has Cologne-Frankfurt (150 km), Cologne-Ruhr (50-100 km), the Hamburg-Bremen-Hanover triangle (100 - 150 km) and then a host of smaller cities all at ~100 km apart. These distances seem to be around the sweet spot for high speed rail, shorter and normal rail is just as good, longer and people will take a plane. And even then, I think the Deutsche Bahn is losing money by the bucket.
