[aidenn0]

> At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems.

I think this is the main point of disagreement in this thread; if we have to spend $500M/mile for light rail in the US, it's fairly obvious that rail is not an option. If there is a large learning-factor for building rail that would bring costs down significantly with more miles built, then rail is certainly an option for the northeast US.

[rayiner]

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.

[btreecat]

>and those who accept that we can’t.

So prove it with more than your ridiculous anecdotes and metaphors. You do a lot of claiming and literally no sourcing. Try again, this time with data.