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^Heavy rail works best in really large cities like New York, Mexico, Chicago, London, Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. because they can transport larger volumes of people.

HRT can be just as bad in inner cities as LRT. It just needs to be designed well. It can't rip up neighbourhoods like freeways do, it can't create dead ends for roads, it can't be difficult or somehow confusing to get to the platform, it can't have big ugly barriers separating the ROW from traffic and sidewalk, etc.

Light rail is fine anywhere as long as it's designed well. Usually it works best by taking a lane or two away from an existing road rather than demo'ing buildings or parking lots or parks closest to the existing road and tearing it up for new tracks as it reduces the width of the road making it more friendly for people to walk to their train station. LRT goes through Downtown Vancouver, Downtown San Diego, Downtown Calgary, Downtown Edmonton, Downtown Portland, etc. and are highly used and accessible.