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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them?

This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station.

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> This is very clear in the article: poor transportation from where they can afford to live to the expensive area around the station.

This is precisely why I'm saying the article doesn't make sense: how about exploring the idea of building the LRT in the non-gentrified areas, i.e. where you would supposedly put your bus routes.

But then that area would gentrify and those residents would be priced out. To prevent that effect you need to build enough light rail to counteract the gentrification effect. And you can’t do that because rail coasts so much to build.

Whereas road for buses costs nothing, because it's already there, because we can't imagine a country in which we cannot trace an uninterrupted asphalt path from the driveway of a house in one city, to the driveway of another house in another city.

Roads cost practically nothing compared to rail. We have two to three million miles of paved roads in this country, and we spend around $200 billion a year maintaining it and building more. People drive 3 trillion miles on highways alone, adding up to a per passenger mile subsidy of $0.01-0.02. Rail subsidies (for local transit) add up to $0.50 per passenger mile.

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