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And no, people aren't going to abandon their automobiles for the street cars, no matter how charming and environmentally-conscious an urban light rail might be, not 'til you pry their cold dead fingers from around the steering wheel.
The voters eventually told the political elite in no uncertain terms that this was one boondoggle up with which they would not put!
But there's no denying the charm, so long as someone else is paying for it.
People love their personal vehicles, and for good reason. Sure is convenient to go where you wanna go, when you wanna go there. For more than a century we have built our world around cars. And it works pretty darned well. Generally, anyway.
But it comes at a huge cost. All that infrastructure has cost untold trillions, and will continue to. It feeds sprawl. And it has been an ecological disaster, historically. Et cetera.
Still, the personal car is here to stay. Propulsion and navigation systems are changing, which should go quite some ways toward addressing pollution and congestion and safety problems.
Mass transit won't get people out of their cars entirely, but in most metropolitan areas it should at least slow the growth in personal vehicle usage.