This article is just BS. This is a line used vary often by fossil fuel advocates to dissuade investment in mass transit infrastructure. You see the fossil fuel lobby cannot say "screw mass transit, lets all drive" because after suffering couple of hours in traffic, every citizen will figure out that this theory is unworkable. So instead, they say "we don't need rail, we need buses, and we need to build "bus infrastructure" (which is just roads)." Then of course, the fossil fuel lobby can work behind the scenes to gut the bus budget and the "bus infrastructure" can be used for cars instead.

The lobbyists then say "Buses are for ordinary people, railroads are for the rich, blah blah blah". Usually, this line completely ignores the fact that buses and railroads cost about the same in most places.

To his credit the author does address this fact here, but his analysis is shallow and downright silly. He says, "yes they cost the same, but railroads are usually in more expensive neighborhoods." Well, yeah we live in age when high density neighborhoods are expensive and getting pricier all the time and Light rail is most suitable for high density neighborhoods. So that is not surprising.

And then he complains about how light rail makes home prices go up. Yeah, well that just means it is successful. When a city service is successful, it makes the area it serves more desirable which people from less desirable areas want to move there which makes prices go up.

The response to that should not be to make everything less desirable to ensure affordability, but to learn from the successful and desirable places and make all parts as successful and desirable. Thus, eventually there won't be enough rich people to move in, and you will have just a nice affordable livable city. Would you be in favor of setting half a city on fire in order to make the other half more affordable to live in?

His graphs show that he is trying to mislead readers. Why do you think he made the color of bus lines in Toronto so similar to the color of light rail in Toronto? Or why did he color certain high usage bus lines that prove his point in bright red, and certain low usage bus lines that do not prove his point in much darker shades, and then in the legend he only said that the bright red lines are bus lines. Or why did he split the most popular Toronto street car line in two? He said "I separated out the 504A and 504B so that they’d fit on the graph; otherwise it’d break the y axis." They would not only break the y axis, buddy, they would also break the entire premise of your article.

If he had a dot that represented a light rail line that is much twice as high as any of the bus lines, then his premise that light rail is unnecessary because it can be handled by a bus line kind of goes out the window. But that is the reality.

He correctly says that light rail and buses work best in combination with buses being feeders for light rail lines. This increases the ridership of both buses and light rail. But that fact leads to the conclusion that both light rail and buses must be built. This is what most cities try to do nowadays. Instead the author draws the absolutely wrong conclusion that light rail needs not be built.

So yeah in conclusion this is a typical professionally made manipulative troll article. It has a couple of nuggets of self evident truth to get some authenticity and not look like a complete troll, it tries to harness a lot of pre-existing anger about an issue (high housing prices) and disingenuously channel that anger towards his issue (less light rail), and it has some graphs that are very carefully designed to be confusing and misleading to the max.