In reply to: Imagine if we had invested in mass transit to a functional posted by GoldCoastIrish
The investment is not much at all.
Light rail costs like $120-200m per mile. Freeways are well south of that.
And certainly not in a per person moved comparison. You really don't want to see that math.
Particularly if it takes into account full gamut of costs, such as:
highways - repaving, cost of cars, gas, parking lots(!), etc
mass transit - operating costs, pensions, loss time due to longer trip times typically, offset by benefits of denser development
And the “per person moved” metric is inherently biased against public transit. People do not take it because it often sucks. Guess why?
Here in Chicago, they are really pushing Transit Oriented Development as they expand the city’s rapid transit lines and bus routes. Developments tend to cluster around transit stops. Without a stop, it’s hard to attract people and businesses to certain areas of the city. At the same time, it’s hard to convince the city to put stops in areas with little to do. They are trying to address this with the new Red Line Extension and bus projects by soliciting proposals from developers for areas around announced transit stops.
Ridership and funding faces a similar problem. Budget dollars from the state and city are often allocated to agencies based on their ridership. It’s generally slow and not well maintained, so people don’t ride it…so that agency gets less funding…etc.