Two things on my mind reading this article are:<p>1. I am not convinced the idea of commuting as "self-correcting mechanism" was presented well (or much at all). I was expecting to learn a bit more about this point.<p>2. Half of the points have a counter-example in both Houston and Dallas, where most of the LRT doesn't go to wealthy residential parts of town. Some of those rich parts of town are still <i>actively fighting it coming near them</i>, in fact.<p>Those two cities come to mind because I have experience living in both, and can compare with my experiences living in denser, older cities like Tokyo, Berlin, and Santiago, where a variety of networks were built for different reasons across different eras. Then again, even in Santiago, the the subway stops just before you get too deep into residential parts of Las Condes.<p>But I am also a non-expert, and at the end of the day, instead of going point-for-point and saying <i>"Well, look at what Dallas did. Surely [blah, blah, blah]"</i> there are two factors that weigh heavier on my mind: cost and historical political context.<p>Cost is foremost. While LRT is less efficient long-term, it is cheaper to build transit at-grade by about a factor of five (I read this long ago and forget where, or I would happily source). Histotical context, in that many grand subway systems get built in a time where, for the city to prove it was a top-tier global city, you demonstrated civic grandeur and engineering prowess by building a subway system. The prestige was used to push past the barrier of it being eye-wateringly expensive. Also while we have made these options safer over time, it has come at a (worthwhile, but non-zero) cost of more regulatory checks that have made the cost gap even greater, and harder to cover by dreaming of prestige<p>Both cost and context ultimately combine into political feasibility.<p>For a city like Denver, Dallas or Houston, if you ask the transit wonks who fight the good fight at the municipal level, I don't think you would find many that truly would choose LRT over other commuter rail, all else equal. But all else was not equal. Cost was the big barrier, and the context did not exist to cross that chasm, so they got what they could, when they could.<p>Houston only got its network because of a starry-eyed chance at the Olympics and/or Super Bowl. Originally it was just one line, then a plan for a 5-line network, of which 3 were built, but now possibly up to 4 again. I could write an entire essay on the mistakes made along the way, public and private, in that first line. Just look at the land-use (really the land-lack-of-use) in Midtown between 2000 and 2010 despite the LRT's presence. Yet the power of a network grows with every additional line, so once you at least have something, you might as well leverage that and add to it, rather than sell the public on a completely different approach.<p>In the end, I share the concerns of the author, but I do not see the narrative being quite as clean when I set it against the specific cases I am familiar with.