I'm not sure the size of the country matters that much. 1/3 of the country live in Auckland, so the population in that one city is far higher than anywhere else in the country.

We should be comparing against similar sized cities in other countries.

As an example, Adelaide is slightly smaller in population than Auckland but has light rail. The gold coast has half Auckland's population, but has light rail. Calgary in Canada is slightly smaller in population than Auckland but has light rail.

Light rail makes sense when you need to move a lot of people over a specific section, such as to and from an airport. Anyone in Wellington knows how hard it is to get bus drivers, but light rail can carry several times the number of people per driver.

I've never read a cost/benefit analysis on a potential $30 billion to build this (as per article, they don't really know what the end cost could have been but this was quoted as a possible upper limit), it seems kinda crazy for a 20km track. But at the same time, it seems they were purchasing new land to build it. Given skyrocketing house prices in Auckland since 2017, I can see how buying people's properties could have been a hard to estimate number.

If this could have cost up to $30 billion, can we get a subway for $30 billion and avoid paying people for land?

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 3 points 9 months ago

This is way out of date but its talking about cities in Europe that both have, and don't have underground systems.

https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/misc-largest-cities-without-metro-subway-and-smallest-cities-with-it.404033/

Back then Belgrade was guessed at being the largest without an underground, but they note small cities like Lausanne, 130k center, but including wider population 320k were getting a subway. Or Rennes which had a wider population of 550k at the time and had a subway system. Now, they're not digging on a volcanic field so perhaps it was easy to do, but in terms of Europe, 1.6m without an underground system of some kind is a slight aberration.

Of course, there's cities in Asia where there's 10+ million without an underground either so on pure population its not unusual at all :)