Crunching these numbers gets me about 11 years until savings over the smelly loud buses has paid for the project. A leader in getting this done right was Gov. Jesse Ventura, a proponent of very small government and more rail. The leader of the opposition is now Governor. One of my favorite billboards the opposition had all over town was a picture of an old passenger engine with the caption: "Rail, like the bus only slower".

What's been happening in the US (and for that matter, in Europe too) for the last forty years is that people have moved to the suburbs and jobs have followed. This pattern was made possible by cars and roads. Build roads, people buy cars and move to the 'burbs. Eventually, the jobs follow. Since O/D pairs are so diverse and volumes between each pair so small in suburb-to-suburb commuting, they're tough to serve with ANY kind of public transit. Result: transit market share goes down.

That's basically what this "study" says, and it's correct as far as it goes. That is what has been happening. But there are some signs that folks are getting fed up with longer and longer commutes in heavier and heavier traffic. In Chicago, there's an enormous boom in inner-city housing. Whole neighborhoods near the Loop are being completely redeveloped. People are moving back to the city.

The back-to-the-city movement is only possible because of public transit. These folks would NEVER move to loft condos west of Chicago Union Station if they had to drive to work. Get real.

So the authors of this "study" do a good job of telling us what has been happening for forty years, and they endorse more of the same, apparently. The problem is that those of us in the transportation business know that miles driven can't continue to increase at three times the growth in population -- we won't have enough room for all the roads we'd have to build.

So what to do? Diss transit because "nobody rides it" and condemn us all to gridlock in the near future?