> But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really

> But I've lived in large cities that mostly do light rail, and those that mostly do subway. Subway is much better all around when it's done right. It's really impressive just how many people and how reliably (time-wise) a well-designed subway system can move around. You can't move people around if your subway doesn't go anywhere because it costs too much to build it out completely. Take the Calgary CTrain vs Seattle's Link. Link was monumentally more expensive than the CTrain (we built a 2 mile tunnel for about the same cost as their entire system). Calgary built more miles, but at grade. Seattle built fewer miles, mostly subway. Calgary has 314k daily riders, Seattle has 80k. Seattle's system has a higher average speed, but services a fraction of the population because the system is so short. Calgary, on the other hand, has ridership so high that building a tunnel to increase capacity in downtown corridors has an ROI so obvious that they didn't even have to ask taxpayers for more taxes because it payed for itself. I too voted for ST3 despite not getting any direct benefit from it. But by building a system that prioritizes speed over coverage, ST3 relied on the benevolence of taxpayers to get it passed. Luckily there are enough people willing to shoulder that burden in Seattle, but not every city has the liberal culture of Seattle, and even then it undoubtedly would have been much easier for it to pass if it had a much higher proportion of the population covered. Let's just imagine that I'm a (entirely too common) taxpayer who only votes to pay for things that I directly benefit from. Would it be easier to persuade me to vote for a system where I save 20 minutes on my commute, or a system where someone else saves 25 minutes on their commute?