Metra even works in the snow! And in the 15 years I've been using it has not had one strike. Whereas London suffers rail and tube strikes every few weeks.
Add to that commuting from the Chicago Burbs costs about 1/3rd of what commuting from the London suburbs does.
When they lost it to LNER, though, it turned into a complete nightmare. I've done 4 round trips now between London and Edinburgh on LNER and have had air conditioning in my car a total of 0 times, and the already long 4.5 hour ride delayed by an hour or more each time.
Maybe I've just had terrible luck, but 8 separate legs and 0 comfortable rides leads me to believe it is completely mismanaged, and that regular maintenance isn't occurring.
My town (pop. about 80,000) has a bus system. It's a college town, and a few routes that run between campus and student apartment neighborhoods are heavily used. But otherwise most of the buses drive around empty especially mid-day and at night.
It's not anywhere close to self-sufficient.
It contributes to a lot of people who don't use the bus themselves to think the whole system is a waste of money. Especially when you see a large diesel bus driving around with zero, one, or two people on board.
We'd keep 90% of the benefit and cut a huge amount of cost if we just killed off all the routes that the students don't use. But the system is more political than pragmatic so it doesn't happen.
Changing the wiring on your subway so it doesn't catch on fire is really expensive, but nobody's going to notice if the subway doesn't catch on fire.
London and New York have subway systems that are extremely complex and on the verge of self-destruction most of the time due to budget constraints. Other, newer systems have decades to go before they face the same crunch.
NYC is also riddled with inefficiency and corruption that bloats the price of everything they build, which create and exacerbate those budget constraints. Costs per mile of new track and maintenance are consistently an order of magnitude or more higher in NYC than in other parts of the world, with higher rates of encountering problems; this may be partially due to the complexity of building there, but given that fantastically busy and complex cities throughout the world don't have these same problems, I'm much quicker to blame it on the political and economic system (which, tangentially, is why I think stuff like Musk's Boring Company are targeting the wrong issue when it comes to urban development, unless he's just trying to use that as a trojan horse for municipal influence).
It's odd to see that such an extravagantly lucrative city can't seem to put together the money to maintain a core part of its infrastructure, that much much much poorer cities are able to achieve in other parts of the world.
In "poorer cities" they can just get things done because they don't have the same layers of process. Building a subway line in Nigeria is trivial compared to dealing with the multitude of parties, all of which have significant political clout, that is Manhattan.
It's not that it's "complex"; it's that you would literally have to take on the entire political machine of both political parties in New York, along with the TWU itself[0], in order to push for the meaningful investments that the transit system needs.
[0] The MTA and TWU literally spent the last several months actively campaigning for politicians who would block the plans for upgrading the transit infrastructure. Welcome to New York!
That sounds pretty complex to me. There's a considerable number of moving parts there all of which inter-relate in intractably complicated ways.
I guess by that view, all (stable) corruption is inherently complex. Which I guess isn't wrong, but I'd prefer to call a spade a spade: the problem is rampant corruption that is essentially impossible to address.
It's really not odd at all once you understand just how pervasive the corruption inside New York government is.
Unfortunately, New York exists as a democracy in name only. The party leadership wields full control over elections (and therefore the state government), which means that voters have literally no electoral option for pushing for change. That's why the MTA and TWU are able to get away with corruption and outright fraud that would be astonishingly illegal anywhere else in the country.