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I think that is a more nuanced neighborhood by neighborhood issue. NIMBY is always a thing, and no one wants to live right next to any sort of transit.

There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit. Part of that is that transit doesn't make sense if you get on/off work outside of peek hours; most of the Seattle metro system is biased around serving /Seattle/. Transit systems in the counties to the north and south serve even less, have much tighter budgets, and therefore also have much less service. This is one of those self-re-enforcing loops.

With the HOV Toll Lane revealing just how horrid traffic on I-405 is (again absolute lack of urban planning), I think that you'd find many would agree about doing /something/, /anything/, except for taxing them in any way. Little do they realize that you pay 'taxes' in other ways, like having daily commutes of hell and a poor environment for their children to enter the workforce within. I know that my own career development is still severely hampered by having grown up in a suburb, without a car, and thus also with less access to the scarce jobs in the area that many (but not all) of my peers took up. I suspect that there probably weren't enough 'after school' jobs to go around though, so those who did get experience early got a head start on learning how to handle interacting with employers.



>There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit.

I agree with that in most cases, especially in low density wealthy cities, where people would avoid using transit even if it were more convenient, just to avoid the general population.

But in the case of several Bay Area neighborhoods the opposite is true. All else equal, in the urban core people pay a premium to live near a major mass transit station.

I guess you need a critical mass of upper middle class working people, good enough transit, and terrible traffic for this to happen. I certainly never saw transit access marketed as a selling point before moving here from flyover country in the dot-com days.




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