CHICAGO — As a civil engineer, Om Goel had faith that Chicago’s world-famous El, however old and rickety, was maintained well enough that the trains would at least stay on the tracks.
That was before the car he was in during a rush-hour commute lurched off the rails, igniting a smoky fire and sending him and 1,000 other passengers scrambling through a dark tunnel.
“My confidence is now absolutely shaken,” said Goel, 63, one of more than 150 people injured, six seriously, in that July 2006 accident.
Industry watchers share his sense of dread. They say the nation’s oldest subways are in dire need of repairs and upgrades to fix everything from decades-old track in Chicago to serious overcrowding in New York, but don’t have enough money to keep up.
Federal, state and local spending on mass transit is around $40 billion a year, and that should be increased by $25 billion to properly repair and upgrade U.S. networks, the research firm Cambridge Systematics has concluded.
Chicago’s century-old system threatens to become a liability as the city bids for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Two competing cities, Madrid and Tokyo, have modern rail networks.
