Building at-grade is much more realistic in a suburban setting than in the urban core, while distances are still much shorter than intercity
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That accounts for the sweet spot wrt costs. As for ridership: typically, the bulk of a metropolitan area's population is suburban
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That population doesn't stay put in the suburbs, though, and frequently travels to and from the city center (or its subcenters)
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Now, this doesn't mean you can *ignore* urban transit, which is the sort of keystone of the entire system--but that however important...
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...transit in the urban core may be, it is unlikely to carry the volumes of people that suburban transit carries, and so won't make as much
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The necessary disclaimer in all this is that it presupposes urban and suburban transit are operated at the same service standards
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That is, suburban transit can *never* pull its weight if it doesn't also have high-frequency all-day service
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"Suburban transit" here strictly refers to its geography, NOT to a different standard of service--this is what America gets badly wrong...
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...with its notion of "commuter rail," thinking suburban transit is only viable for a particular sort of travel, rather than general purpose
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But isn't there a risk of increasing white flight from the suburbs if they are easily accessible to the urban population?
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