Smasharoo wrote:
. I'm not really sure what the arguments *against* mass transit are, to be honest. Legitimately. I'm trying to think of some POV that makes sense to oppose it, but I can't. I mean aside from the "never spend money on anything!!!" argument that would also apply against having law enforcement, roads, fire services, etc.
Oh, there are a bunch of them, some of which are more rediculous than others. I've probably heared most of these at one point or another. Please note that this isn't my particular viewpoint on the subject, but just possible arguments:
1. Ticket cost. With very few exceptions, a mass transit system will never fully pay for itself without external subsidies or initial capital investment by ticket sales alone. The problem gets worse the shorter the particular transit segment is for bus systems, and worse the longer the system is for Rail based systems due to maintenance costs on the rails themselves over time and the need for bridges, etc.
2. inter city mass transit is often seen as a magic crazy homeless person teleporter, which is of course the only method a homeless person could travel from one area to another to wreak property crime and threaten the virtue of unsuspecting children. Put one in, and BAM, instant crime wave.
3. Safety. Not so much that a bus or train crash is going to be more dangerous than the average number of car crashes involving that same number of people, but the fact that the injuries and fatalities all occur at once can overwhelm emergancy responders and medical facilities if it were to happen, which is sometimes an argument against rail transit in smaller cities
4. We already have busses, why do we need light rail too (or trams, or BART rail, etc). This one is one of the more utilized ones, often tied to the cost argument. People see the point to point destination, not the overall network tie and less stops and transfers and notice that busses also go the same places that the train is going to go and argue that the additional speed and lack of 3 hours worth of waiting for transfers and whatnot isn't relevant for most riders except for poor people, and they don't count as real people anyways.
5. I saw that batman movie with the impossible water vaporizer thing and don't realize that human blood also contains water in it. Yeah, people have actually used the mass transit mass destruction weapon delivery platform argument and were serious about it.
so yeah, this is why we don't already have a space elevator.