We’ve all come to expect instant results and that’s really not going to happen here. Most of that scatter was built up with huge expansion of cars after wwii, it was built up over 80 years. Building last decades, that’s generally a good thing. But taking these two factors together, rebuilding our population centers should be expected to take a very long time. That doesn’t mean we give up: it means we make the investments and changes now. We plant the trees now, with the expectation that our grandchildren will sit in the shade.

One of the ways my city has been reinventing itself is with transit oriented development. Build the train first but develop a master plan around stops to develop people oriented population centers. That takes years to build out plus is one stop at a time. A big change last year was to require every community served by transit to establish special zoning near transit to encourage denser population growth. If this works, we’ll be completely different in a century or so

I was probably arguing both sides 😁

While it’s true we have almost no rail from the perspective of the entire country, we do have a handful of commuter rail systems that seem like a similar scale between cities and towns across metro regions. It’s not nothing

And of course our one “fast-ish” intercity line

And of course I recognize the irony of saying a country the size and population of the US is comparable to a much smaller country