If you're going to lurch about the obscenely over crowded streets of an obscenely over-densified population center, you might as well do it on someone else's (suburban and rural down-state taxpayers') dime.

Cities - the West's collectivist nightmare...

First King Kong or Godzilla attack and that elevated train's gonna be your tomb.

Amazing how the invisible hand still works.

I posted a while back that the riders of the Seattle area "Sounder" trains were being subsidized to the tune of $32 for each one way ticket. I was wrong the actual estimate by Sound Transit is $70 per ride. It turns out that that is the subsidy using the unrealistic predictions of the transit authority that amortize the costs of subsidy over two decades. The actual current tax subsidy is over $270 per one way trip between Everett and Seattle. Currently it averages only 700 trips per day ($2.50 each way) even though it has been around for years.

http://www.effectivetransportation.org/docs/SounderNorthAmortized2005.shtml

Soon they'll be getting as much tax money as drivers:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/215446_highway11.html

Unless they have changed the scheme, Metra is susidized in part by a gasoline tax which also applies to the collar counties, many areas of which get little ,if any, service from Metra. At least that's the way it was when I lived southern Will county years ago.

Old-line cities in the Northeast and Midwest used to be designed around their mass transit lines, to the point that some lines were built 100 years ago into what looks like pasture land only to have the city develop around them. Chicago qualifies there in having a large downtown where a mass transity system can bring large numbers of people from outlying areas.

It's the cities that have develped over the past 50 years around the Interstate highway system, where offices may be spread out along main highways through and loops around the cities that cause the biggest problems for heavy rail and even bus mass transit, since not enough people are going in the same directions every morning and evening, as well as going from their homes to shopping or entertainment areas in the evenings and on weekends. If you want to fix that problem, more "car friendly" access to mass transit has to be developed.

oj,
Nobody uses the train. If you were king and raised gas taxes to $3 a gallon, people might then change their - at least until you were violently deposed.

Patrick:

So long as the conservatives recognize they're freeriders.