This is really short sighted. If that original tram network was kept in place and upgraded, then money could have been spent on suburban rail networks. I'm pas

This is really short sighted. If that original tram network was kept in place and upgraded, then money could have been spent on suburban rail networks. I'm passionately in favor of your counterfactual. If we hadn't allowed so much low-density development, if we'd have kept and extended the streetcar lines, if we hadn't invested so much in automobile infrastructure, then we'd be in a much better position today. But now we're faced with a confluence of factors that make getting to that counterfactual really, really hard. Those factors, collectively, are what I'm referring to when I say we're too "spread out." "Spread out" isn't just about distance; it's about population size over a given area. It's about density, in other words.