The good old-fashioned doomsday headline

Metra has a $70 million budget hole to fill and they want to spend $61.6 million on new gallery cars, a design style that is functionally obsolete on just about every other commuter railroad. With ridership forecasted to stay below 50% of pre-pandemic levels, maybe there’s a fix!

I hate arguing against investments in the fleet, but if our options are full schedules that squeeze another year or two out of the Eisenhower-era fleet or service cuts to pay for new coaches that no other commuter railroad in the nation uses any more, seems pretty straightforward