> There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect.
Yes, it absolutely makes sense. The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.
> Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.
Princeton, Texas.
> It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.
No, it does NOT take cars off. A car that is on the road, stays on the road. Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.
You basically need to make your streets impassable before people start switching from cars to transit.
> In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.
Then people would out-migrate, companies will close dense offices, and congestion will relax.
> Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.
Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.
And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.
> Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.
As I sa
> Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.
That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.
And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.
> The US population is not shrinking.
It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...
And even before that, the rate of growth for large cities has been outpacing the population growth for the last 2 decades.
> People want to live there - that's my best guess.
They don't. Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.