[darkangelism]

well a lot of its farms and such, its not people all living closely. Yes rail is cheaper then subway, but once your too the other city how do you get around. I live 12 miles from where i work, too far to walk, so to make mass transit viable i would need a stop within half a mile of my home and of work, and so would people in between thats 24 stops and thats just a straight line. so really you would need a grid of north south and east west subway to be able to get anywhere. like to get to my parents id need a train to go 4 miles east and then take another to go 3 miles north. even just to cover the main 30X30 miles of the city you would need 900 stations if one every mile and 60 train lines, and for reasonably fast service maybe 5 or 6 trains per line. Thats a multi billion dollar project and thats one city, and even if you only need towns over say 50,000 people it would still extremely expensive.