This exact sentiment is echoed by many in the US as a reason to not expand public transit. When asked about criminals driving cars to commit crimes, they were not open to bulldozing the roads over. It's gross.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherlands...
Whether irrational or not, any public transit paradigm has to take the realities of crime and the citizens' perceptions of crime into account if it's going to be successful. And if the crime rate was as low as it is in Europe, it might be easier to get European levels of support for public transit. This implies the need for better policing, earlier social interventions, etc.
If you have strong public spending you have more educated and less desperate people and better public transport.
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
In the US, public spending is generally a way to funnel money to cronies of the inner party (e.g. transit worker unions, construction unions, politically connected consultants). Various other interest groups - mainly NIMBY homeowners - will also demand their pound of flesh.
We need to fix our social technology ( http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-... ) before we can build such things. Luckily we have people like Kalanick taking baby steps in that direction.
I could say, equally (if not more) fairly, that all spending (public and private) is generally a way to funnel money to cronies of the capitalist system (e.g. CEOs, shareholders).
Maybe a more useful thing to discuss is what the money does in the process. Transit workers do provide labor that makes today's transit systems possible, after all.
If you want to claim that the US government spending $2-4B somehow funnels money to the capitalists, it's tangential to my point. Wherever the money gets lost, the point is that the US is simply not capable of building transit the way the rest of the world does.
http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/odds-that-youll-be-killed-by-a-...
...Or are engaged in a criminal enterprise (for murder, not rape).
This is why the (Boston) red line doesn't extend to Arlington.
When I lived in Atlanta a suburban city official explained that "we all know the sort of people who hang around bus stops" while killing plans to expand bus service.
Please don't assume racism where none has been proven to exist.
I absolutely refuse to cease challenging unsubstantiated statements because of this conceptual boogeyman, and so should you.
If this were an attributed quote, you could go look up the source and argue context. It isn't.
http://www.mdjonline.com/news/marta-s-expansion-remains-cont...
If you read up on the history of public transportation in the US, you will be gobsmacked by the racism at play.
To wit: in NYC, the highway to the beach was explicitly designed with overpasses too low to accommodate buses, to keep blacks from the beaches and the white suburbs that surrounded them: http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-l...
Here's a quote from 1971
Wilson gave to the media at the time, which said, “People fear that rapid transit would give Negroes greater mobility and consider the $0.15 fare as a gift to ‘a certain segment of the population.’”
Arlington is indeed not such a bad area. But folks in Arlington and Lexington (the planned terminus for the red line) were the ones that objected to the expansion. They didn't want increased traffic (all the people trying to park to take the train would make their towns less quaint and all), and they didn't want the urbans/poors/etc to be able to easily visit.
A fathom is the distance between fingertips. "To fathom" in a literal sense is either wrap your arms around an object to measure its size, or to drop a weighted rope to the seafloor, and haul it up, counting one fathom for each double-arm-length of rope hauled in. "To fathom" in a figurative sense is to acquire more than superficial knowledge of a topic--to attain a full depth of understanding. To be unable to fathom something is literally being unable to wrap your arms around it, and figuratively unable to wrap your mind around it.
A phantom is an intangible apparition like a ghost or specter. It is not usually used as a verb, but if it were, the meaning would probably be similar to "to ghost", which is either to work invisibly or to vanish suddenly, without warning or explanation. As an adjective, it means that the modified word does not truly exist.
People in the US are still very class-aware, even if they are not obviously racist. Anecdotally, at a pool party in her suburban McMansion subdivision, I overheard a black grandmother express dismay at the possibility that someone might build a high-density apartment building in the neighboring cattle pasture, because they attract (literal quote) "that kind of people." Nobody wants poor people in their neighborhood, because it is presumed that even if they don't steal anything they can pick up, they will crash all the property values in the surrounding area.
As someone not particularly fond of driving a car, I would love to be able to get around on public transportation, like I did in Chicago. But that requires density to be cost-effective, and for too many people, density equates to too many poor people living near their stuff. So it's more of a two-part process. The mass transit and the housing density go hand in hand, and the NIMBYs are afraid of both.