Stockholm's core is definitely denser but the population is still there in Portland if the routes were built right. And you're right, Oregon and Portland already do have high taxes. They couldn't fund this themselves. No city does. The federal government would need to provide a lot of funding. In Portland and all around the country. But I just wish the conversation in the US would change. Bold public transportation projects are almost immediate shut down as being unrealistic. It doesn't have to be this way. Nobody talks about the cost and feasibility of highways and roads or the enormous costs of car ownership. We just all default to that and don't question it. Cars are the default, everything is expensive and unrealistic.

ok, you concede that taxes are high at both the local and state level, and your solution is to raise them on everyone, at the federal level? why should the good folks in Hawaii, Texas, Ohio, etc., foot the bill for your shitty transit that no one uses (look up the ridership stats)?

public transit gets shutdown not because it's unrealistic--anything is feasible if you throw enough money at it--but precisely because it's a massive waste of taxpayer money.

California just learned the hard way, but at least Newsom had the balls to call-it-quits on the idiotic high speed rail project. well at least you'll be able to go from Merced to Bakersfield or whatever it is. how many billions were spent on that again?

People in big prosperous states should absolutely pay for infrastructure in other states and they already do. States like California, Texas, and New York pay far more in federal taxes than they receive back in funding. They pay for roads in Iowa and social security checks in Vermont. It's because they are not islands but part of a nation. Sure they might have to pay "more" but it's because if it were not for the nation as a whole, that prosperity wouldn't be there to begin with. If you take this argument down to an individual level, why should we even pay taxes if we'd all be "better off" not paying taxes? It's because we'd all have far less wealth to tax if we didn't have the roads, schools, healthcare, and yes, public transportation that they fund.

Public transit just isn't a waste of money by just about any measurement. The travel and density it enables produces far more economic value than the cost of construction. By international standards, the high speed rail in California is quite expensive and they should be working on ways to bring that cost in line with other countries. But at the end of the day, California would be better off with high speed rail in the long term. Take New York City. They would be far less wealthy if they didn't have a subway system. You would need far more roads, cars, and infrastructure to support that population if it weren't for the subways. Everyone there would be poorer for it. By that same token, cities like LA and San Fransisco could be far wealthier if they had public transit that matched their population and density. Creating far more wealth and taxes dollars that can be used to subsidize those roads in Iowa or social security checks in Vermont, benefiting everyone.