Believers in central planning should take a look at Washington’s Metro rail transit system. While they will find many things to like, they will also see examples of how central planners — and especially rail transit planners — can get things disastrously and expensively wrong.
Things to like include aesthetics. Metro stations and cars are attractively designed and reasonably spacious. Metro attracts more riders than any other American rail transit system except of course New York’s.
It has stimulated local planners and developers to create vibrant downtown-like clusters of stores, restaurants and apartment buildings along the Orange Line in Arlington, Virginia, and around the Bethesda, Maryland, station on the Red Line.
