Yes—I think it’s a difference between people who accept that light rail costs us $500 million/mile and subways cost us $5 billion/mile and those who don’t. Also, those who think we can run reliable, efficient public transit even with good funding, and those who accept that we can’t.

I used to be a rail fan. Then I rode Amtrak to work for a couple of years. I saw the DC Metro, which is well funded, so badly maintained that automated train control, a core feature when the system was built 1970s, had to be turned off. (That was a decade ago and there is no sign of it ever being reenabled.) I came to the conclusion that Americans running transit projects like the Europeans or Japanese is just wishful thinking. A camel cannot be a bird no matter how much it wants.