>>1994046No, I agree with this. No one expects the highway system to turn a profit. It costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain the road system in the US which only services cars, and yet no one talks about the roads in term of profitability. Yet they hold public transit to a different standard, which sets it up to fail and thus perpetuates the car monopoly. Because if they were held to equal standards cars would never manage to show profit as they are like carpet bombs on your urban area, whereas trains are compact, don't waste ten trillion acres of space on aspault oceans and stinking noisy car sewers. Trains naturally support business. Train station? Perfect place to have restaurants, convenience stores, and even entire shopping malls like Japan does. Do you know what is next to highways in the US? Nothing, because no one wants to exist near a godforsaken fucking highway. Any houses that were unfortunate enough to be nearby when they built the highway will see the property value plummet so hard they get abandoned.
Cars cost us more than the budget of 3/4 of the rest of the world's nations combined, destroy land value, waste hours of our days, waste hundreds of dollars a month for the average consumer that could otherwise be spent on something that generates value, and are a maintenance nightmare, a financial black hole, sucking up budget and returning only potholes and crashes. Trains are the embodiment of value. Wherever trains go, prosperity follows. Land near stations skyrockets in value. When we get what small crumbs of modern rail we're given, the stations bloom in 5+1s and luxury townhouses.
AND YET what do they keep building and what do they keep defunding? Oh. Oh, the government keeps making the stupidest choices possible and then complains the budget is busted and they're broke. Oh, really?
