TW: I like trains. I like them in Europe, I have liked them on the limited trips I have taken in the U.S. You see things, the security is not smothering and you have a ton of space.
But generally Americans neither like nor support trains. I know the distances outside the East Coast are long, but still.
As for the subways, do not get me started. But I would suggest instead of cities like Chicago begging state lawmakers (most of whom do not live in Chicago) for more money just raise the damn fares, transportation is not charity, folks would pay especially if the things moved faster than a tortoise.
From Bernstein at Int'l Herald Tribune:
"...Charming as it is, though, the Q [train in NYC] is slow...It...stops frequently between stations because, as the conductor helpfully explains, trains are crossing in front of our train, and this always leads me to wonder: why is it that European and Asian subways don't have to stop so that other trains can pass in front of them?
The answer is that New York's subway is older, and it was built with crossing tracks, to which I pose the further question: how is it that in the time other cities have built entire transportation networks from scratch, the greatest and richest city in the world hasn't been able to build tunnels or overpasses so as to avoid our chronic underground gridlock?
The truth is that when it comes to rail transport, from subways to transcontinental lines, Americans haven't made much palpable improvement, at least not compared with our friends and competitors in Europe and Asia. It is as though we got fixed in amber someplace between the 1920s and the 1960s with our big cars, our slow trains and our crowded, legroom-challenged skies.
And while the rest of the world forges ahead with new and better ways of moving people from place to place - namely on super-fast trains - we are waiting in the tunnel for the train ahead to cross.
...President Barack Obama's stimulus package provides some $8 billion for the development of high-speed trains, presumably along the lines of those that rocket over the landscape in Europe, Japan and, most recently, China.
As the New York Times correspondent Michael Cooper has reported, that $8 billion isn't enough to pay for a single high-speed train, much less a full network of them. Moreover, governments, both federal and state, have begun investments in high-speed trains over the years, only to have the various projects falter. The expense is too great; the public doesn't clamor for TGV-like services. The attitude seems to be that fast trains are, like universal health insurance, for other countries, not us.
"It's my perception that a significant part of the population is ignorant of high-speed rail transport," said John Spychalski...at Penn State who has studied high-speed trains for years. "They don't know what it has to offer. So fundamentally you've got a product that's unknown to a large number of people, who mostly think of their personal automobile or their pickup truck when it comes to transportation."
...The absence of investment in rail travel leaves the United States looking pretty third-worldish.
...According to the Mineta Transportation Institute, in the final 22 years of the 20th century, U.S. government investment in highways was $251 billion; air transport got $114 billion; train travel came in a distant third at slightly over $18 billion - that last about seven percent of the first..."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/25/america/letter.php
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