Seattle is building the most expensive light-rail system in the world, yet Seattle Times writer Jon Talton defends it saying “the economic benefits are clear.” Those benefits, apparently, are that a handful of people are able to live without a car, yet it doesn’t occur to Talton that the came benefit could be obtained with a much lower-cost bus system.
Photo by wings777.
According to the American Community Survey, the Seattle urban area had 1.9 million workers in 2023 and fewer than 16,000 — that’s 0.8 percent — took light rail to work. The survey also found that only 28 percent of transit commuters didn’t have any motor vehicles in their households, and if that applies to light-rail riders, then fewer than 4,500 Seattleites live without cars due to light rail.
That hardly seems justified by the huge cost of building Seattle’s light-rail system, which eventually is expected to exceed $130 billion. One 7.1-mile line now in development is expected to cost $9 billion, or close to $1.3 billion a mile. A 4.7-mile line is expected to cost $3.2 billion, or nearly $700 million a mile. For comparison, most light-rail lines built in Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose in the 1980s cost under $50 million per mile even after adjusting for inflation to today’s dollars.
Talton is proud of not owning an automobile and imposing the costs of his transportation on other taxpayers. I oppose all transportation subsidies, but subsidies to driving average roughly a penny per passenger-mile, which means auto users pay more than 96 percent of the costs of their transportation.
According to the 2023 National Transit Database, Seattle light-rail riders like Talbot paid 18¢ per passenger-mile in fares, while operating costs alone averaged $1.29. Taxpayers not only had to pay the other $1.11, Seattle spent another $8.90 per passenger-mile in light-rail capital costs in 2023, which means passengers paid just 1.8 percent of light-rail costs. Where’s the economic benefit in transferring people from low-cost transportation that requires minimal subsidies to high-cost transportation that requires 98 percent subsidies?
The Seattle Times article alludes to other supposed economic benefits, such as transit-oriented developments and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But the transit-oriented developments themselves are subsidized, as they would have to be since they cost more to build per square foot and most Americans consider them less desirable housing than single-family homes. So the “benefit” of light rail is that taxpayers not only have to subsidize the rail, they get to subsidize the development along the rail line. And any environmental benefits from the fact that light rail is electrified are no greater than the benefits obtained from electric cars, which can move people for far less money per passenger-mile.
Talton is guilty of survivorship bias. Light rail is low-capacity transit, so sometimes it is going to look crowded. He rides it and sees the crowds and assumes everyone is riding it even though hardly anyone is. He also doesn’t feel the real costs of building and operating it since those have been dumped on other taxpayers. As a result, he exaggerates the benefits and ignores the costs. In essence, he is saying “We need light rail for the Greater Good, which is greatest when it is good for me.”
The car is truly economical. It is expensive to buy, expensive to drive and expensive maintan. The car infrastructure costs a lot, if done properly do protect pedestrians and cyclists even more. The car allows for fast and direct travel to save time for workers. It causes a lot of healthcare expenses including diabetes treatment.
“The total estimated cost of diagnosed diabetes in the U.S. in 2022 is $412.9 billion, including $306.6 billion in direct medical costs and $106.3 billion in indirect costs attributable to diabetes. For cost categories analyzed, care for people diagnosed with diabetes accounts for 1 in 4 health care dollars in the U.S., 61% of which are attributable to diabetes. On average people with diabetes incur annual medical expenditures of $19,736, of which approximately $12,022 is attributable to diabetes. People diagnosed with diabetes, on average, have medical expenditures 2.6 times higher than what would be expected without diabetes. Glucose-lowering medications and diabetes supplies account for ?17% of the total direct medical costs attributable to diabetes. Major contributors to indirect costs are reduced employment due to disability ($28.3 billion), presenteeism ($35.8 billion), and lost productivity due to 338,526 premature deaths ($32.4 billion).”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37909353/
The car is truly a way to increase income and lower the quality of life. Only non-economical transportation like light rail is good for our quality of life, because it incentivizes and enables an active more happier lifestyle. Talton is absolutely right to give subsidies to uneconomical light rail.
So now in support of your promotion of making citizens transit-dependent, you argue car use causes diabetes? Have you no shame as to the extent you will go to promote density for the sake of density?
Stadtmensch, you’re comparing apples and oranges to put forth costs in the U.S. The U.S. has different demographics, different health care system, and many other things different from Germany, where you live.
Transit will never be remotely useful to the vast majority of the population in the U.S. because transit inherently serves a very narrow segment of any population here and it is absurdly expensive to implement. No one here is fond of the transit dependency you promote. Cars are far more versatile and useful for the bulk of the population.
Regarding your pretextual arguments about diabetes, a 2024 paper on diabetes in Germany states in part: “In Germany, at least 7% of the population have diabetes, while this number is predicted to increase by up to 77% over the next 20 years”. The paper supports its conclusions with cites to various research papers and journal articles.
Point is you have transit and supposedly walkable cities where you live in Germany. Yet the incidence rate of diabetes is increasing in your country.
You aren’t eliminating diabetes with density or transit. Indeed if your country (Germany) is an example, the incidence of diabetes is increasing with density. You can argue correlation but not causation as you typically do, but then that undermines your own argument as to causation in the U.S.
Your arguments are just pretextual and contrived to support your religious fanaticism for density. You start with an outcome and contrive pretexts for an outcome.
In other words, you’ll have to come up with another bogeyman to promote your density religion.
https://pophealthmetrics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12963-024-00337-x
These days a car isn’t necessary anymore. We have the technology to provide a healthy lifestyle without needing the private automobile. We can design giant outdoor living rooms that provide everything we need. The problem is our urban environments are designed to make traveling by car as convenient and fast as possible. Our urban areas aren’t prepared for the post automobile age. So we are stuck in a death spiral of unhealthy car dependency. Diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mental illness is widespread in car dependent places. Light rail alone won’t make a difference, but light rail + compact cities would. Seattle is far from becoming a compact walkable city, but building the nations most advanced transportation system is the step into the right direction.
“These days a car isn’t necessary anymore.”
A car has never been necessary, but it is certainly useful and convenient as evidenced by the decades-long growth of car-ownership and the slow demise of transit-based public transportation.
For most people, public transportation isn’t necessary. New York City may be the outlier, but it is also a very expensive place to live as well as being, in my experience, loud and dirty.
I suggest asking your favorite AI, “Is there a trend in the US of people living outside or in large cities? The first paragraph of a response from Microsoft Copilot …
“Yes, there’s a noticeable trend of people moving away from large cities in the U.S. and settling in exurban areas—communities on the far outskirts of metro regions. This shift has been particularly pronounced since the COVID-19 pandemic, with factors like rising housing costs and the increase in remote work playing a major role.”
Sources include the US Census, theweek.com and investopedia. Systematicvisionary wasn’t listed.
There is no car-free city in the US. There isn’t even a car-reduced city in the US like in some European countries. Even NYC is infested with cars. It’s the major reason why it is so loud. So why do you continue to argue with people’s preferences within the status quo? You can not opt to live in a car-free city if there is none.
Systematicvisionary lives in Germany and has never set foot in the U.S. However he’ll try to portray himself as having superior knowledge. Here are just a few of the posts started on city-data under the alias “Stadtmensch”:
Subdivisions are bad
Physical Isolation in Modern America
If You Hate Density, Maybe Don’t Live in A City
We need more Streetcar Cities
Human Scale Neighborhoods
How Fire Departments make us less safe
…and on and on.
The Automobile is the single greatest mobility Innovation in human history.
Before the car most people lived within walking distance of their jobs, this sounds advantageous but it rendered populations dependent on the jobs that were available. The ethnic neighborhoods we often see tourist attractions 100 years ago were ghettos. Greek Town, Chinatown, little Italy. These quaint names don’t hide fact these areas were points of geographic lockdowns.
Henry Ford’s horizontally integrated manufacturing was copied by virtually every other consumer industry. Jobs fled for Suburbia before people did.
Even transit/walkable friendly cities. Cities like Tokyo and paris… without a car you re stuck with geographic lockdowns…. rhays why 68% metro Tokyo residents and households have a car. Netherlands, there more registered cats than people to drive em
That’s not true, before the car people commuted by streetcars, commuter trains and bicycle to work. No one was stuck with the jobs in their neighborhood. Maybe you are talking about pre transit ages, but it wasn’t the automobile that invented commuting. That’s just nonsense. When manufacturing left the cities their quality of life improved, except for those cities that replaced stinky and noisy factories with stinky and noisy cars. You should research how many trips are done by car vs walking/bicycle/transit rather than just counting the number of cars. Japan and the Netherlands have a much higher number of trips done by other modes of transport than a car and it shows in their vital statistics and quality of life.
Systematicvisionary: Given the repetition with out actually saying thing that you seem to constantly engage in, am I correct to assume you are a troll?
So you are saying the US health crisis doesn’t exist?
The U.S. has the highest rate of overweight and obesity among industrialized countries. Approximately three out of four adults are significantly overweight. This raises the risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Only about 24% of adults in the U.S. meet the U.S. guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities. For adolescents, it’s even lower, at just one in five. In 2020, 23.8% of U.S. adults were classified as physically inactive, meaning they do not engage in any physical activity outside of their daily tasks. This figure was 24.5% in 2018 and 24.4% in 2016. While a slight decrease has been observed in recent years, the proportion of inactive individuals remains alarmingly high. In 2021, Americans spent an average of 11 hours per day sitting. Approximately one in four Americans sits for 8 hours or more daily, and 4 out of 10 Americans are considered inactive. The U.S. has the highest rate of diabetes among adults aged 20 and over compared to other countries. U.S. citizens over 50 years old face a high risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases. The number of adults receiving treatment for mental illnesses has increased, and almost 50 million Americans suffered from a mental illness in 2022.
The cause for this? Rising car-dependency and increased sprawl. New data from transportation analytics specialists shows a concerning trend: daily walking trips in the U.S. decreased by a staggering 36% between 2019 and 2022. This is despite brief upticks during the pandemic, which might have temporarily encouraged more outdoor activity. This decline was observed across all major metropolitan areas, with reductions ranging from 23% to 49%. Americans generally walk fewer steps than people in many other developed countries. A 2010 study found U.S. adults averaged 5,117 steps daily, significantly lower than averages in Switzerland (9,650 steps) and Japan (7,168 steps). More recent data from 2017, using smartphone activity, put the U.S. average at 4,774 steps a day, still below the global average of 4,961. A major contributing factor to the decline in walking is the long-standing infrastructure bias towards driving in the U.S. Cities are generally built around cars, with policies and engineering guidelines often prioritizing vehicle movement over pedestrian needs. This leads to fewer safe and convenient walking routes, long distances between essential services (e.g., grocery stores, doctors’ offices), and a lack of mixed-use spaces, all of which discourage walking as a primary mode of transportation. The lack of walking (and cycling) activity in the U.S. is not just a lifestyle choice; it’s a systemic issue with profound health implications, contributing to higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, and putting a substantial burden on the healthcare system. You think this isn’t an issue, but light rail is? Absurd!
Systematicvisionary: Your assertion that “Rising car-dependency and increased sprawl” is the primary cause of obesity and obesity linked illness in the US is absurd. Most people don’t commute more than 30mins a day. The sedentary lifestyle in the US is directly attributable to the number of work hours Americans put in which is one of the highest in the industrialized world. Additionally, we do not eat well and likely the stress of overwork contributes to these chronic diseases. Assuming that someone who has to ride a train 2 hours a day is going to be healthier than someone whose total commute is 30mins is just ridiculous.
That’s not absurd at all. Car-dependent areas have little walking and cycling activity in general, not just for commutes. And commuting by transit means you have to walk and from the transit stop. It adds up. People in other countries are healthier, because they have more physical activity implemented into their daily lives. The life expectancy of a European bicycle city is off the chart compared to a typical American suburb. That’s not a coincidence, their cities enable an active lifestyle. Things that are considered inconvenient on this website are considered a net positive in other parts of the world.
“NYC is infested with cars. It’s the major reason why it is so loud.”
Manhattan in the congestion pricing zone WAS loud, but getting quieter thanks to the new pricing.
– https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/03/11/traffic-noise-complaints-drop-congestion-pricing/
– https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/congestion-pricing.html
Let’s stop just accepting bad things as inevitable and start expecting good things as possible.
That was to be expected. Less cars => higher quality of life. The Antiplanner doesn’t understand this, because he thinks in categories of fast and convenient travel alone.
I suggest not using A.I. and instead think for yourself. The frequent use of A.I. tends to make people lazy and paranoid.
Is it harmful or helpful? Examining the causes and consequences of generative AI usage among university students
I suggest to google some statistics about quality of life in America vs Europe.
SystematicVisionary “because he thinks in categories of fast and convenient travel alone.”
AP actually thinks that the farther you travel per day, the better your life is.
I would like to propose a thought experiment to him: imagine two cities (or suburbs, exurbs, whatever, it doesn’t matter). The two cities are exactly identical in every respect, except city A is twice as spread out compared to city B, as if it was a rubber sheet that you stretched out by 2x in each dimension.
My question to the AP: are the people in city A better off? They should be, since they are moving around twice as much as the people in city B.
AP doesn’t understand the concept of compact cities with shorter distances.
The people in A are happier because they have more room. The population disperses away from density.
You mean less room. Americans are prisoners of their property and cars. So Americans are desperate for more room they can never achieve the way they are trying. This is what you call “The population disperses away from density”???
Nope, I mean the people in A have more room. Less dense = happier than B. The people in A are happier because they have more room
1. People in A are evidently not happier, on the contrary.
2. People in A have less room and less freedom of movement. The non-walkability of A has been studied lot of times.
Before the car, People WEALTHY enough to afford daily streetcar use rode street cars.
Once automobile became popular after 1910 it saw a dectuple rise ownership rates and 20 fold rise in daily use. Car based technology was adapted into another vehicle the BUS. Buses vastly undercut streetcars because they took advantage of preexisting infrastructure tha was already public good, the road system of which America already possessed 2 million miles of.
The streetcar was the main mode of transportation for the masses before the automobile age. Where did you get the misinformation from, that streetcars were only for the wealthy? When the car was invented, it was truly revolutionary, I agree. However the car has become a burden on the quality of life. Its biggest selling point, convenience, is the sweet poison that literally kills us off. It decreased the quality of our public space, the space that is needed for an active lifestyle that treats our body and mind. Nowadays humans are increasingly living in pods (cars) and boxes (homes) and it is killing us.
Visionary (wink),
So what’s your solution and how would you implement it?
You have done a great job of pointing out everything that *you think* is wrong with American cities, but you haven’t given us any indication that you have a realistic vision (hence the “wink”) for tuning them from open sewers to outdoor living rooms.
The solutions to the problem are well known and have been studied deeply. The problem is most people don’t understand complex issues.
But you do understand complex issues, right? You’re one of the brilliant ones! Is it asking too much to ask you what your solution is and most importantly, how you would go about implementing it? You’re like a doctor who diagnoses an illness then treats it by criticizing the patient’s lifestyle and bad decisions. Come on, let’s see what you got!
“The people in A are happier because they have more room. The population disperses away from density.”
Good point IC_delight. No one lives in B anymore – it’s too crowded.
Nice Ueckerism. But your question was who is happier. I responded folks in A were because they had more room. I responded the residents of A were because they had more space. You apparently agree.
Population dispersion from dense areas does not mean no one lives there nor that the area is no longer crowded.
People are dispersing away from car traffic.
Nah the population disperses away from density. Dispersion can result in more car traffic. However that is preferred to the congestion, bad schools, higher crime rate, noise, and political nonsense that comes with “city living”. Don’t want the traffic or noise from the protest/festival du jour, etc.
There is no correlation between dispersion and density. You are making up stuff.