Today I Learned

Your assumption that busses exist so they can be improved is quite telling. Huge swaths of the population, even living in million inhabitants+ cities, simply are not served by any form of mass transit.

The reason public transit works so well in Germany (where I did live for a bit) and Holland (visited and read about) is not because taking a car is more expensive. It's because mass transit works well, it's there when you need it, gets you to your destination in reasonable time and comfort, and is easy to use.

The very urban fabric in the USA is car oriented. Every little bodega has to have a dozen parking spaces built by law. Supermarkets have 3 to 4 times their store area wasted in parking lots. Everything is far apart because of this, so walking is impractical. With everyone driving to places, you need wide, fast roads, which makes biking places very unsafe. Every once in a while I see a white painted bike attached to a memorial in a light post, commemorating a life lost. And I live in the suburbs.

It's not an insurmountable problem, the Netherlands did that in the 70s. But any solution that proposes a simple fix is doomed to failure. This has to be a concerted, intense effort to work.

My approach would be to jack up vehicle registration fees. Simply doubling the vehicle registration cost every year over about 5 years would make individual car ownership expensive enough that people will really try to avoid it.

By the fifth year you're looking at about $5k per year just to legally own and operate a car on public roads, which is workable (most people pay more than that per year for their car loans) but it's more than enough to make any family think twice about owning more than one car, and more than enough to make not owning a car and just renting/taking public transit a super attractive option. Plus it's more than the cost of a mid-range e-bike so trading your car for an ebike becomes extremely cost effective with a break-even point measured in just months

5 years is also enough time to get roads reconfigured for the new traffic flow of mostly ebikes, get more buses in the roads and start planning/building out new train routes. There's an incredible rail network still in the US and just putting out more passenger services on the existing tracks that are presently freight-exclusive would make a massive difference

That's wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to unpack it.

So the problem is the term "light rail" and "heavy rail" are really technically meaningless. Historically they referred to how physically heavy the actual rails the trains ran on were because freight railroads used a much heavier rail for their mainlines while interurban transit services used cheaper lighter rails because they almost exclusively ran what would now be called an "electric multiple unit" with 1-3 car trains, thereby not requiring more heavy duty rails

Nowadays the actual rail is far from the largest cost and the operational simplicity of using the exact same grade and standards of rail as the freight railroads means they can move their equipment on the freight railroads' tracks and freight can be moved on their tracks as needed. Because this shift happened to occur during the period of railroad disinvestment in the US nobody really bothered to update the nomenclature so now that we're reinvesting in rail it completely makes no sense at all

Personally I like to use the terms "interurban" for frequent local services with equipment tuned for commuters that runs between cities (and I mean "cities" from a functional definition not a legal one. Just because Shuamberg is legally a separate city doesn't mean it isn't functionally part of Chicago. There really aren't any remaining interurban services that fit this definition in the US anymore) "commuter rail" for passenger rail service within a sprawling metropolitan area and runs equipment tuned for commuters, "regional rail" for passenger service that goes further than a simple commute or a quick run to the store/museum, has equipment tuned for passengers spending more than an hour on the train. And "long distance rail" for passenger services that are tuned for travel of greater than 300 miles. To me "metro" refers to a grade separated urban rail transit system (so like Chicago's L or the New York Subway) and "tram/trolley" refers to a ground level urban rail transit system functions like a higher capacity bus, potentially intermixing with car traffic

But this just demonstrates the problem which is that the US has so disinvested in rail transport that there's no clear, consistent definitions in use anymore so people have to define what they're talking about every dang time!

Maybe, but I’m not familiar with chicagos system

• Amtrak == intercity. Travel from one city to another, potentially long distance. Scheduled
• Commuter Rail == into and out of the city, over a large region. Typically Bring commuting workers in from suburbs and may be scheduled to prioritize rush hour
• heavy rail == “normal” trains, might be used as subway or surface. Typically travel from one part of a city to another, and operate continuously, with minutes between trains
• light rail == slower, cheaper, a tram. might be underground or a streetcar. Typically travel along neighborhoods, more local transit. Scheduled continuously with minutes between trains

Here in Boston

• I can take Amtrak to nyc, to Portland Maine, or to Albany and west
• we have commuter rail lines covering half the state to bring people from towns and suburbs into Boston.
• we have I think 3 “heavy” rail lines operating as subways, and on the surface as it leaves the city proper
• we have a light rail line operating in tunnels through the city center but on the surface as a tram or streetcar through various neighborhoods. For example students can hop on the get from one end of Boston university another