Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.
That project is privately funded. The Block 37 station was the expensive vaporware.
This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]
- area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1]
- area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1]
- rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2]
- rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3]
- goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4]
- goods carried, "Europe": 0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year)
I guess it feels like the distances involved in the US are more advantageous to freight, and in the EU are more advantageous to passengers
Since then railroads have to be completely self-supporting in the US, they focus on how they can achieve the highest productivity: giant, slow trains on shoddy track.
It also means the infrastructures are competing with one another, so there are redundant, shoddy, competing rail networks, rather than a network for slow and heavy freight trains, and a network for fast and light passenger trains.
Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)
The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...