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It's fair. NYC is 8.8 million, bay area is 7 million. Tokyo is about double that.

Not being negative. Being realistic. It's unfortunate that being realistic often is negative. Transit here is garbage. You either luck out and live and work near transit or you're like most people and have to drive.

A couple million in energy savings doesn't mean anything compared to the amount wasted by cars.

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Those are not the right population metrics to compare. If you're talking full Bay Area, you might as well talk NYC metro area (MTA claims to serve 15.3 million [1]). Tokyo's even trickier, but I think 36 million [2] seems closer to right.

It's probably not worth arguing about too much, because ultimately I agree with you that there's a lot more to be done to reduce car ridership. But pointing at those places and saying "copy them" misses a lot of structural differences.

[1] https://mta.info/about [2] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/0056b6a98b8b4a48869f822...

Surely the relevant metric is population density?

You have the causal arrow backwards. A high density train network enables population density and high energy efficiency.

At current population density all of our lives would improve if a network as dense as the tokyo metro appeared in the bay area over night.

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