» Is Nashville advancing a rail system that it cannot handle?

From time to time, it’s worth taking a step back.

The Nashville region’s bus network is not exactly popular, with a total annual ridership of just less than nine million; that’s about 30,000 weekday trips in a metropolitan area of 1.6 million people. The 32-mile Music City Star commuter rail line, which has operated between downtown Nashville and Lebanon since 2006, handles about 800 daily trips — compared to the 1,500 originally expected for the corridor.

Public transportation in Middle Tennessee, in other words, is not big business.

No surprise, perhaps, considering that the City of Nashville has a density of 1,230 people per square mile. By comparison, Portland, Oregon has a concentration population roughly four times as intense. New York City, at the extreme, is 22

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