Sweet Home Chicago
From before the first European’s arrival, Chicago was a transportation hub for the North American continent. It provided a water link from the Mississippi delta to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence.
Chicago was incorporated as city a decade after the opening of the Erie Canal, as the Midwest and Plains began to be scratched by European plows. Railroads followed a decade later.
The Tribune has a good piece on one of Chicago's present rail yards, how it’s changed over the last couple decades, and looking to continue to change.
To change American car-culture, rail is part of the solution. Not just for transportation of people, but goods. The Tribune has an interesting fact about the last couple decades’ goods transportation,
"The per capita amount of goods consumed by an average American hasn't changed much in 40 years. But the amount of truck traffic has tripled."
"That's true in part because the rapid delivery promises by Amazon and others often force the companies to run trucks half empty instead of waiting for them to fill up."
This is the exact opposite of what needs to be gotten from information technologies in regards to energy use when transporting goods from manufacturer to consumer.
First question — how instead of building massive, oil dependent, centralized warehouses as distribution and storage points can we instead distributedly organize goods’ storage and transportation, looking instead to getting the most fuel efficiency from trucks by allowing people to access the majority of needed goods by walking and biking? Win-Win as they use to say; daily exercise to get your daily needs. Then rebuild up from there, using more collective transportation: vans, buses, and trains.
Rail's a big part of changing entrenched car culture for both moving goods and people, there's no need for it to be high speed – no one's going anywhere.