This Is What Mass Transit Looks Like

All the innovations in transportation are good, but we still haven’t shattered the basic paradigm of carting around 4000 pounds of steel to get us to work and back.

The issue, of course, is profit.  Selling steel and oil makes money, and building trains doesn’t.  This, of course, is another example of externalities, i.e., costs that are not captured in the transaction of buying and selling cars and gasoline.  When we start paying the costs of cleaning up the long-term environmental damage of all this, mass transit will look like a bargain in one hell of a hurry.