I’m all for nostalgia, and I understand some folks find a certain romantic aura about trains, but they are simply impractical for solving traffic problems. It’s not just the per-mile cost to move people as compared with building more highways or highway lanes, or the transfer of air pollution from idling in congested highways to idling waiting for another train to pass, or the path-dependent nature of railways, or the fact that people will still drive to access the train (but have limited mobility during the day owing to not having access to a vehicle), or one of the other myriad reasons to oppose this idea. It’s also the fact that, as Spain and France have learned, trains provide an easy target for terrorists ? miles of potential places to place a bomb and hundreds of people to be affected by any single blast.
Pertaining to 21st-century socialists’ continued fascination with this 19th-century, one-direction, one-way-fits-all, pack-’em-in, communal form of transportation, there’s a study waiting to be done, if Google is any indication.