Not really. LA is certainly not a financial hub, and neither is Houston — being business hubs is not the same as being financial hubs. Charlotte is admittedly the home of banking HQs but most actual operations are located, you guessed it, elsewhere: Bank of America has a bigger presence in transit-oriented San Francisco than in Charlotte. And Charlotte just started transit-building. Chicago may not be transit-oriented, but oddly enough the *financial district* of Chicago — the Loop — most certainly is transit-oriented.

My guess is that finance involves, or at least involved prior to the Internet, a lot of proximity between different people, and therefore required a very high density of commercial construction, which therefore required a lot of transit. Perhaps the moving of financial interaction to the Internet is going to end the whole “financial hub city” concept, however.

It’s not a stretch to say that New York City and Washington, DC, are such vital, important cities because of their transit networks.

Except that DC’s importance has grown with the size of the federal government for decades, long before the Metro.

If bankers in New York had to drive into the Big Apple everyday and couldn’t enjoy Metro-North, the Long Island Rail Road or New York City Transit, New York just wouldn’t be a financial hub.

Why not? Auto-oriented cities can be financial hubs just like transit-oriented ones. New York is the largest financial hub in the US for historical reasons, but if you start looking at contenders for second largest, you get cities as diverse as Chicago (second largest stock exchange), Los Angeles (second largest city GDP), Charlotte (second largest banking center), and Houston (second largest number of Fortune 500 companies). Of those, only Chicago could plausibly be called transit-oriented, and even that’s a stretch.

“Senator McCain strongly objects to earmarks in the bill such as a $1.5 billion earmark for the Washington . . . Metro system and questions if this money is warranted above the needs that may exist among other mass transit systems in our country,”

…then it’s more prioritizing Washington’s Metro over other american metro systems, which is actually sort of a good point. Washington definitely has the all-around best Metro system in the country (although of course San Francisco and New York are exceptional in certain unique ways), and I think that’s a direct result of them having a disproportionate amount of Federal interest relative to other systems.

That said, of course it’s ridiculous to be against the Feds funding it. Most transit systems are funded by their state, and in DC the ‘state’ is the Feds. Also it sounds to me like John McCain is actually a proponent of not having the feds fund transit at all, rather than funding transit adequately and equally throughout the country.