Great Cities and Mass Transportation

Althouse gets the ball rolling and her spirited commenters take over about this post which links to this column about the bamboozledry of mass transit.

It's too late now, of course, but what strikes me about the above links and commenters is that the same arguments seem to be trotted out in whatever city deems it desperately necessary to have mass transit. And how those promises never seem to materialize. I'm afraid that those people who put mass transit on the top of their shopping list for the new MAPS3 projects have been sold a bill of goods.

Yeah, yeah, mass transit works well in a lot of big cities; I've been to Washington only twice in my lifetime and I find the Metro endlessly pleasing to ride. But for a lot of other big cities mass transit doesn't work and it won't work here, either. We're not limited by geography - we're not an island or otherwise hemmed in by natural borders - and we're free to expand as we need to. Which is really the crux of the argument, isn't it? Freedom. By relying on mass transit to get us around, we're giving up the freedom to decide how and when we'll get to wherever it is we're going. We let the government decide for us.