I want more passenger rail, but would like to pile on that the US rail network is freight in a way not seen in Europe.
When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail.
(I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
> (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
My guess is it's scale. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and yet it's 600 miles from any ocean-going port (the Great Lakes doesn't really count, since it's not practical to navigate for any interoceanic shipping). There's smaller cities in the interior of the US that are even further from the oceans. By contrast, in Europe, it's hard to get more than 400mi or so away from a major port.
Chicago used to ship to the coast through the Great Lakes.
The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that trade made both New York and Chicago what they are today. But railroads became a thing and they just built a new one that followed the same route as the canal.
You can also ship down to the Mississippi from Chicago, but again you're dependent on a canal to bridge the gap to the navigable waterways.
When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail.
(I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)