> The road is in use 24 hours a day, and the rails are mainly idle. This is a measurement error: you might see 300 cars in an hour and only two trains, but th

> The road is in use 24 hours a day, and the rails are mainly idle. This is a measurement error: you might see 300 cars in an hour and only two trains, but those 300 cars are carrying 600 people while the trains are carrying 1500 each. The road appears busy and the rail system idle, but the exact opposite is true in terms of volume of people moved. (It could also be true that the train system isn't well utilized in your area, but the fundamental point about scale and measurement is the same.) As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the main cost of mass transit is actually labor, not the rails (or even trains) themselves. The US is somewhat behind the times in realizing this; just about everywhere I've been in Europe has healthy mass transit systems that run cheaper and more reliably due to increased automation.