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Notes -
Much of my post was about demonstrating that transportation isn't a free market, it's massively distorted by government intervention and regulation. I too care about open space, which is why I advocate for more space efficient transit, and also about drug fee zones, which is why I endorsed O'Toole's idea of building secure turnstiles that cannot be easily hopped.
I updated the piece about Experian after Walterodim pointed out we don't know what percent of cars are new or old, and instead took my numbers for the total private costs of car ownership from O'Toole, who estimated $1.15 trillion in 2017, and got his numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
This is much what I said - O'Toole is making criticisms of mismanagement rather than of engineering. Problems of mismanagement can be solved by better management, as they are in most of the developed world, not just Japan.
If the problem was "management", we would have outliers. We do not, and public transit in the United States is universally filthy, violent, dangerous, and corrupt. Every single system, from majority white Portland to majority black Baltimore, from frozen Chicago to boiling Houston, from wealthy San Fransisco to impoverished St. Louis, is a graft-ridden cash grab that shovels billions to the politically connected while providing nothing but rolling asylums for the insane to shit in climate control.
You cannot have public transit without public-minded people.
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