Why transit suddenly costs so much.

Good article. He keeps focus on the transit itself, which is certainly a stylistic choice, but I can't help but mention that there are a couple things I'd add to an article like this.

1. Transit can obviously be expensive, but even expensive transit is monumentally cheaper than roads. The example of the Toronto subway expansion serving 61k people for $344m works out to $5,639 per person. In this comment, I calculated the cost per person for roads in a random rural county at $432,000 per person.

2. He lightly touches on this, but often a huge driver for cost is the automatic assumption that transit cannot touch an existing right-of-way being used by car traffic. If you start with the assumption that you can't just take a couple lanes away from a road to build something at grade, you've likely already upped the cost by an order of magnitude. The cost of the decision to preserve car travel lanes should not be considered a cost of the transit project, it's a cost of the personal automobile project.

Great article