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If customers prefer the private auto, why not simply give them more roads instead of extraordinarily expensive systems that only a 2% or so of the local population will use?

People in Germany have much denser cities and it costs a lot more to keep cars there. That's why public transit can succeed there, while it's a dismal failure everywhere in the US but New York.

I don't think Americans would stand for making cars as expensive to run as they do in Germany.

D

The reason why only 2% of the people use public transportation is that it does not help them get to and from their work or to where they want to shop. More than a decade ago, Lewisville chose not to buy into DART because its people did not want to spend the money, since the roads were at that time adequate. But now the city has grown by leaps and bounds and even an idiot can see that it will take twenty years just to build a road net that would handle the traffic TODAY. And cars are multiplying like tribbles. But the idea has got hold that everyone should have his own car. One day my wife and I were driving along 635, a heavily congested loop and she was observing that hardly any cars had two or more persons in this. Later driving north onf I 35 We saw that this was true of most of the cars moving north with us. Man, many of these were SUVs, so we have the fact of all these large cars carrying just one person. My wife and I flew into Pittsburg on our way to Europe via her homtown in WV. We rented a car and then dropped it in Philadelphia. When we got out I was exhaused from fighting the traffic and this was the middle of the day. The next day we landed in Frankfurt and again rented a car. We got on the Autobahn and drove north toward Cologne. After about five minutes I turned to my wife and asked her: "Where are all the cars?" because in the very urbanized area between the airport and Mainz, the numbers of cars was nothing like what I had experienced driving into Philadelphia. I know tourists are scared of driving on the Autobahen, but despite the high speeds and occasional staus that will back up traffif for miles, it is nothing like driving in the States in a majority urban area.