I'm just curious if you're aware how much money beyond that 250 a month is subsidized by federal money? You seem to imply that the cost is outrageous to expect people to pay, and I'd agree, yet the irony is that few things are as insanely subsidized as FrontRunner and TRAX (Utah's light rail system). TRAX has a per rider subsidy, if you factor in construction cost and maintenance, of 6-7 dollars. So if the people were actually paying full price for just ridding the light rail they'd be dishing out about 22 dollars for a two way trip. If they were smart they'd never have built light rail, but rather have taken that same money and quadrupled the whole bus system in Utah to actually give us a transit system that was actually responsive to the transit needs of our population. They would have moved more people, displaced more cars, and not have an absurdly 'tightly coupled' infrastructure where a single technological failure shuts down entire valley transit lines. But people see electrical trains, feel and see a smooth ride that can accelerate really fast and, to the best of their discernment isn't 'dirty'. And since they're protected from the real cost of the system they have illusions about it's capacity to cure traffic woes and save the planet. Never mind that when Utah was growing full tilt the number of new cars on it's roads replaced what TRAX's entire network managed to replace after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

Here's another interesting fact. When I looked into Front Runner's costs (which relative to other faster trains is relatively inexpensive) and did the math to spread it over the population for whom it was moving their commute off the road and found that the costs equated to over 50,000 dollars per rider. That's to say that we could have bought everyone a nice hybrid and we would have done likely a better job for the environment, for less money, and not have had to extend a rather limited and fragile infrastructure.

Trains make no sense, not even in Japan nor Europe. Look at the actual numbers, whether it's the fiscal costs or the total environmental costs of the system and it's support systems compared to their equivalents in a trainless world.