[betaby]

There were couple of videos on YouTube outlining how transport driven development makes poor people even more poor. Reasoning is that light rail transport makes housing along it more expensive. It's definitely feels like that in Montreal near REM, although I don't have 'proofs'. Gentrification on steroids kind of reasoning.

[orwin]

It's more about public transportation make the urban middle class richer, and have marginal to no effect on lower class people or rural middle class. As long as roads are not paid for by tolls and gas taxes but by general taxes (basically mine), public transportation should have no negative effect for poorer people. That's why i don't bitch about car being way, way more subsidized than train/buses in my city, and i find people crying about it out of touch and to be honest quite selfish.

[cyberax]

> It's more about public transportation make the urban middle class richer, and have marginal to no effect on lower class people or rural middle class.

It means that if you want your life to become better, you have to move in closer to the large cities. In turn, this means that your living conditions will worsen.

> That's why i don't bitch about car being way, way more subsidized than train/buses in my city

My state is doing the inverse. We (heavily) subsidize transit, and our car infrastructure is paid for by user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). The results aren't so great.

[occz]

That source makes claims that its data does not actually back up - that road infrastructure is actually paid for by user fees, while only actually providing data that highway infrastructure is paid for by user fees. Highways are clearly not most road infrastructure.

[cyberax]

They use the Census data reported by the cities. It's called "highway and street", and it includes all the surface roads except for roads with limited access. Their table just somewhat misleadingly removed the "street" part of the series name.