by Arborwayfan
If everything to 128 or even further were one city (Houston-style), you might get more rapid transit and less CR. As it is, the various suburban and semi-suburban cities and towns (like Needham, Newton, Waltham, Westwood, etc.) have much more interest in CR than in rapid transit, so there are a bunch of city/town governments pushing for CR, and just a few city gov't pushing for rapid transit (Boston, Brookline, Somerville, Quincy, Revere, Braintree, Milton, Malden... as I list them I'm not sure my math works out, but I still think it's possible that a big city might have been even more into RT than greater Bosto in already). At least we have one agency doing CR and RT. Compare to Chicago, where CTA and Metra are separate agencies, and where the suburbs get a lot of state funding for Metra -- very classy CR -- while the CTA has trouble getting enough money to run trains that serve more people (at least in terms of pax miles per trip, population density, etc.)