Similar to how LeBron James trying to not let the video of him getting dunked on was available from other sources, the internet holds a record of everything, and I think it’d be best if you say what your error was, and then comment on Glaeser’s conclusion.

Your grand vision is for denser walkable cities. I get that. But you can’t go from what Kansas City is now to what you want it to be without some steps in between. Unless you’ve got billions and billions of dollars to turn parking garages back into city blocks and build the urban paradise complete with schools that would attract people to live along these light rail lines.

No one lives downtown. Anyone standing on a street corner on a typical day has driven there from the suburbs for work or play. If you put light rail there, you’ll be asking people to park their cars downtown and then get around town on a train. That doesn’t make much sense. Using an existing rail line is an inexpensive way to at least get people to ride a train. A train that gets them from where they live to where you want them to be.

Once you do that, they’ll be on foot. Then you can convince them to get on a bus or a trolley. Maybe.

Even in Charlotte the furthest stops on their light rail line are the busiest. They’re park and rides. People are using it as a commuter train.

Great to see you covering Australian issues, but I encourage you to avoid expressing much of an opinion about transit developments in Sydney, since this is a place where announced transit projects often incur significant green, pro-transit opposition.

State government (which holds almost all of the power in the Australian system) is balkanised in the worst possible way — even worse than, say, the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s. The new metro has been set up in opposition to the old, established commuter rail operator, Cityrail, and instead of a reasoned public debate about which mode is best where, what’s occuring seems to be a raw political tug of war.

Unlike the Brisbane-Gold Coast region of Queensland, Sydney lacks any centralized transit planning authority that could be a site for public consensus building and for the rational comparison of different modal options. For this reason, the state government tends to generate project proposals that have only the shallowest consensus behind them. As a result, announced rail projects are canceled so frequently that nobody really believes a project is happening until construction begins.

The Sydney Morning Herald (smh.com) is the newspaper of record, and reasonably smart on these issues.