>...positioned over the road ... positioned in relation with the street above or below.

This is the part that I find most frustrating because it implies that surface street vehicles should take priority over accessible public transit. That's a view I reject as being against the public interest, but I recognize that I'm in the minority.

Meanwhile every parent with a stroller, every person with mobility issues, every person who's just plain dead tired after a day of work, every person who got a crap night's sleep because they are working 2 jobs, is forced to use the stairs so that cars drivers of vehicles aren't inconvenienced.

/rant

A friend of ours was involved in an adjacent agency and had seen some of the issues that proved insurmountable. So I know that they looked at it, but it is still frustrating that there wasn't a solution. My guess is it involved acquiring property on the street for the additional infrastructure required, but I don't know.

I'm on the N :P

Was there? I don't know. I believe there are stretches of continuous welded rail on the line near me, if not the entire line.

I live in an elevated line, and for about 9 months we didn't have uptown local service because of track replacement. The yanked out the old segmented track and replaced it with continuous track. It's a massive improvement to the quality of life in the neighborhood. The clacking noise of the wheels hitting the seams between track segments is gone, it was well worth the wait.

My only complaint is that when they upgraded the station (a separate year-long closure), they weren't able to install an elevator to either platform from the street. Our station remains inaccessible, which is, I think, a failure on the part of the redesign plan.

100% agreed. I'd gladly pay additional local, state, and federal taxes if it meant that nobody in the US needed to pay to use "public" transit. I wonder how much that would cost, spread out over all the tax payers

There is a distinction between hominID and hominIN. neanderthals and denisovans are frequently considered to be hominins, which implies a closer relationship with homo sapiens; hominids are more distant relatives. As noted above, chimps and bonobos are hominids.

That's where they live. That's all residential on that block