Wrong—the claim has nothing to do with what rich or poor people like to use.

The claim is that the only way to provide affordable public transit that's sustainably accessible to people who aren't rich (that is, even when gentrification occurs in the city core) is to provide surface transit (buses), which can serve a much larger area than light rail.

> Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents.

Sure—let me know when you find the funding required to build all those "human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere." In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

The problem is largely not about lack of “funding” per se, but more about zoning laws, urban planning more generally, and a whole society organized around driving and inefficient sprawl housing with large-scale short-term subsidies but long-term unsupportable infrastructure.

(More funding for transit certainly wouldn’t hurt. Also, buses are great, especially BRT with dedicated lanes. Buses, light rail, subways, commuter trains, long-distance trains seem like complementary parts of a transit system more than competitors.)

There are plenty of cities in the world with effective subways, light rail, and BRT serving working-class neighborhoods.

Great—let me know when you've changed the zoning laws, fixed urban planning more generally, and how the whole society is organized around massive subsidies for driving and inefficient sprawl housing with long-term unsupportable infrastructure. In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

JIt would be great if every place in DC was within a 10 minute walk of a subway station. The costs make that completely impossible.

https://images.app.goo.gl/Z2h71ZhmkmEAPAEo9

DC is a triangle ten miles on a side. Look how much area is without subway service. (Most is those are lower income parts too, on the eastern side of the city.)

By 2040, DC is studying the possibility of building maybe one new subway line within city limits. One. Maybe. New York is working on Phase II of the Second Avenue subway, a 1.5 mile segment. It’s currently stuck in environmental review hell, and if they get through that this year and start construction, they project being done by 2027-2029. It will take decades to build the whole 8.5 mile segment, and probably $20 billion plus.

These are two of the most transit oriented cities in the country (not to mention, immensely progressive politically). The idea of having numerous transit oriented neighborhoods, such that transit isn’t a scarce amenity that causes property values to skyrocket, is completely unrealistic. At least with any sort of rail.

It’s too expensive (relative to expected ridership) because almost all of the area not near subway stations is zoned as low-density residential and I believe mostly consists of single-family detached houses (didn’t help that the city was shrinking in population for 50 years from 1950–2000).

Not having enough 1- and 2-bedroom apartments in low-to-mid-rise buildings for all the people who now want to live in them is not some law of nature though.

https://statisticalatlas.com/school-district/District-of-Col... (This isn’t a great map; maybe someone can do better than my 3 min web search.)

No, it’s too expensive full stop. There’s plenty of density in many of the neighborhoods not currently covered by rail. But it’s costing $3.8 billion per mile to build subway in New York now. DC would be less, but at these prices new subway is pretty much a non-starter.

And yet it works for Tokyo, London and Copenhagen to pick three random cities.

Those cities do not spend anywhere near as much as the US does per mile of rail. (Whether surface, elevated or underground)

Rail requires an investment. There is an upfront cost followed by at least a century of return. These cities have been investing in their networks over time.

Look at Crossrail's per mile cost (for the new sections of track)...

The problem is that our required investment is multiples more for the same result. To use one of the examples above, Copenhagen is building a fully automated circle line subway underneath downtown for the same price it's costing Maryland to build 13 miles of non-grade-separated light rail through the suburbs.

Crossrail's per mile costs are still a fraction of New York's. Crossrail upgraded 40+ miles of above-ground track, redeveloped dozens of stations, renewed 20 bridges, and built a 15-mile segment of new track (13 of them in subways) for about $20 billion. And in just a decade of construction. Phase II of the Second Avenue subway, meanwhile, is costing $3.8 billion per mile. And just the first 4.5 miles of the 8.5 mile line will have taken 20 years to construct, not including the significant prior work that was done since the 1970s.

So how are you guys able to build freeways and even homes if your construction costs are so high?

(If you've ever tried to get a builder in Copenhagen or London you won't start talking about construction worker wages as being lower in Europe!)

We can’t build things, which is why our infrastructure is shit pretty much across the board. My daughter’s school bought a failing golf course and turned it into athletic fields for students. It’s taken 8 years since the school first purchased the property to build a baseball field, a track, and some tennis courts. There was three separate law suits and it took almost 7 years just to start construction.

Public projects are even worse because of a law called NEPA. The law requires a detailed environmental study of pretty much every significant project, including new rail projects. Just putting together the environmental impact statement can take years. The median is 3.6 years and a quarter of projects take more than 6 years: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/CEQ-EI.... Because these are all administrative decisions, there are numerous opportunities to file lawsuits, take appeals, etc., over pretty much any decision made in an EIS.

Any significant transit project can expect to spend at least a decade in planning, permitting, and litigation, with litigation continuing through construction. The environmental and administrative laws are so broadly worded, pretty much anyone can hold up a project for years using various pretextual reasons (water runoff, wetland management, threatened species, traffic management, etc.).

Contrast how France does things. In France, the government is a single organ—local governments are mere administrative subdivisions of the national government. Decisions get made, and whatever environmental review is needed is done, and once that is done, the legislature passes a law that preempts any other law, allowing the project to proceed without further legal challenges.

Also, I think Europeans for the most part aren’t antisocial tools. People in Chicago sued Ronald McDonald House Charities to stop building of housing for families of cancer patients being treated at Northwestern Hospital.

I went looking for the Ronald McDonald House thing and couldn't find it. When did this happen?

> So how are you guys able to build freeways and even homes if your construction costs are so high?

I mean, the US... Mostly doesn't, in the kind of city large enough for subways. Have you seen all the articles on how bad the housing situation is in places like LA, SF or NYC?

The housing situation in London has been comparably bad.