Buses are transient and routes change over the years. Streetcars, due to rails, give a sense of permanence to an area to encourage development. San Francisco is a great example with expansion of the N-Judah. You can see development along Cole Valley, UCSF, Inner Sunset, etc precisely because the rail tracks were planted there.
Sounds like the author just doesn't believe that good public transit matters. He works for the Cato Institute and wrote books about "the futility of government planning"? Yeah, it shows - this article is basically just "how to tell if your transportation project is ideologically correct according to a strictly Randian worldview", and that world sounds like a pretty depressing place to live.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 16.1 ms ] threadOTOH, the 405 expansion project in Los Angeles was a boondoggle. $1.1 Billion and Five Years Later, the 405 Congestion Relief Project Is a Fail: http://www.laweekly.com/news/11-billion-and-five-years-later...