Perhaps the reason the Marks (Steyn and Hemingway) deride the idea of light rail is that it is worthy of derision. Let’s have a look at how light rail worked out for Los Angeles:

Three light-rail lines have been added to L.A. county’s transit system in the last 20 years. Together, these cost $2.5 billion in capital costs, they serve about 125,000 passengers per day and account for a fiscal loss of approximately $252 million per year — if one acknowledges that capital costs are real, something that transit operators and boosters often neglect.

So if you do the math, The capital costs alone come to $20,000 per daily rider (and that’s making a generous assumption about how many “regular” riders there are). Add in the annual operating loss, and it would have been cheaper to buy each rider a Dodge Neon and a full tank of gasoline each week for the rest of his life.

All of this for a negligible decrease in traffic congestion:

In no city in the country does light rail ridership equal more than 1.2 percent of travel.