I have only been in the D.C. area for a little over a year and there is definitely budget problems here as well. The problem may actually be that the people, a

I have only been in the D.C. area for a little over a year and there is definitely budget problems here as well. The problem may actually be that the people, and by extension the government, do not believe that mass transportation is a replacement for cars (yet - maybe ever) in a metropolitan area. There may also be a whole hell of a lot of other political reasons (oil and car lobbies, etc). But the end result is the same. When I was in New Jersey I heavily took advantage of the NJ Transit Light Rail system in Newark, and between Hoboken and Jersey City. That was absolutely amazing, and the price point was a hell of a lot cheaper than it is to ride the NYC subway or D.C. metro systems. I really think that the northeast just has had a lot more experience and failures here. The main arteries for traffic, at least that I see, come from Amtrak (which again, is amazing in northeast) and local rail systems such as NJT and PATH. In contrast it seems that there are a lot less people in the NOVA and Maryland area that use D.C. metro and the VRE. Some of that may because of the distance, the belt way, but I think a lot of it has to do with the reliability of the systems (at the very least for D.C. metro).