separate from the perspective of optimising for cost is the goal of optimising for energy efficiency: you get much better energy efficiency by moving more peopl

separate from the perspective of optimising for cost is the goal of optimising for energy efficiency: you get much better energy efficiency by moving more people at once for the cross-sectional area of air that needs to be pushed out of the day. trains are about 50x more energy efficient for moving people than cars. i agree that at some point low-density sprawl wouldn't make centralised public transport economic (even supposing global regulation existed to force the cost of pollution to be accounted for in market prices) at this point in our global human predicament it'd be a bit of a shame not to realise that some ideas that were okay in the past aren't very good ideas any more.