I normally try to stay out of extended debates about the public transportation policy in general or the efficacy of urban rail systems in particular. In my observation, these arguments invariably degrade into atomistic and tedious quibbling and endless rehashing of points previously discussed. The two sides "talk past" each other and nobody's mind is changed. As I noted on my rail debate page, this is probably due to the difference in the fundamental social, political and economic beliefs of the arguers. As such, I don't have a lot of patience for "rail is good/bad" arguments; I generally have better things to do with my time anyway. 

There are valid arguments on both sides of the debate. There are also bad ones. Here is a list of arguments that urban rail supporters and opponents alike should avoid. 

Five Arguments Rail Supporters Should Not Use

1. Rail transit reduces congestion.

We'd all like to believe this one: as sleek, speedy trains are built, people will abandon their cars and hop aboard trains, thereby reducing the number of cars on the road, permitting traffic to flow more freely, and in turn improving air quality as the auto-related emissions are reduced. Problem is: it's just not true. Building rail systems does not reduce congestion, even along parallel corridors. While there is some evidence that the construction of rail in a particular urban area has reduced the rate of growth of congestion, that's not the same as reducing congestion.

Here's why: In a metropolitan area that is constantly adding people, adding houses, adding cars and adding jobs, NOTHING is going to reduce congestion. Even building and widening freeways does not reduce congestion in the long term. As the urban area grows and as more cars are added and more trips are made, the excess capacity created by building and widening the roadway network is quickly absorbed. If the last sixty years' worth of building and expanding freeways through our nation's cities have proven anything to us, it is that we cannot "build our way out of congestion." Anthony Downs, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, explains that it has something to do with The Principle of Triple Convergence:

Downs goes on to explain that Triple Convergence effects transit as well as highways:

Instead of falsely arguing that rail reduces congestion, rail advocates do better by focusing on the idea that rail can improve overall mobility by increasing the carrying capacity of the overall transportation network. A rail line is essentially a transportation artery which allows users to move past existing traffic congestion, which, in theory, should make their commute shorter. Rail users also benefit from reliable schedules, reduced stress, commuting time spent more productively (by reading, working or even sleeping), and reduced costs (less gas, no parking fees). It creates an alternative to sitting in traffic.

Consider this: traffic in places like Washington DC and the San Francisco Bay Area is already horrendous. Could you imagine how much worse it would be if the Washington Metro or BART networks (which handle 937 thousand and 337 thousand boardings per day, respectively) hadn't been built?

2. Rail is necessary in order to attract new transit riders because people won't ride buses.

That's not necessarily the case. While it is true that buses have a poor reputation relative to trains, the fact is that people will indeed ride buses if the quality of service they provide is good. For example, while a local bus operating in mixed traffic might be slow and undesirable to choice riders, a bus using a bus-only or HOV lane might move quicker than adjacent traffic lanes and provide a quicker ride to work, thereby making it desirable to choice riders. It depends on the level of service provided by the mode (bus or rail), not the mode itself.

Those in the transportation profession generally agree that, in order for transit to attract trips that are currently made by car, the time spent traveling by transit has to be competitive with the time spent traveling by car. If a train is built that is slow (perhaps it operates in mixed traffic, like the system here in Houston, or makes frequent stops), if headways (the time between trains) are so far apart as to cause people to wait at the station for long periods of time, if stops are placed so far apart that walking to and from the station becomes long and inconvenient, or if getting to work requires time-consuming transfers (which is oftentimes the case for trains), chances are that a lot of people who are not already transit-dependent will not use it.

Why is Houston's park and ride bus system so successful? Because it is fast, frequent and convenient. During my several months of exile in the Houston suburbs, I used it to get into work downtown. Every morning I drove to the park and ride lot, found a parking space, and walked to the bus canopy where buses were waiting, or "laying over," until their scheduled departure time. During the morning peak period, the buses on this particular express departed every six minutes (some METRO park and ride routes have shorter headways than that!). Once it was time to depart, the bus left the canopy, drove on to a direct ramp to a one-way reversible HOV lane in the middle of the freeway and flew past the traffic directly into downtown without stopping. (Other buses went to the Texas Medical Center). Once the bus got to the stop closest to my office downtown, I got off the bus and walked to my building. In the afternoon, I made the trip in reverse; once again flying past the traffic in the HOV lane to the park and ride lot.

A suburban or commuter rail line, meanwhile, would probably have to stop at every station on the way in to town and would almost certainly run less frequently than the express bus. Once the train got downtown the rider might even have to transfer to another train or a bus to complete their trip to the office. Given that kind of service, what advantage would rail hold over a bus for the suburban commuter?

On a related note, I think that the aversion some die-hard rail proponents have to bus rapid transit (BRT) is misplaced. While BRT is oftentimes oversold by its proponents and is certainly not a replacement for rail in every situation, it does have its advantages (namely, its cheaper capital cost) that make it an ideal transit solution certain instances, for example along corridors that have enough ridership to justify some mode of higher-capacity transit but do not yet have tranist patronage that is high enough to justify rail. 

3. The implementation of a rail system will make a city "world-class."

If you use this meaningless statement to support the construction of a rail system, you deserve all the ridicule you're invariably going to get from rail opponents. What defines "world-class," anyway? And why would a rail system, by itself, make a city "world-class?"

Wikipedia defines a "world city" as "a city that has a direct and tangible effect on global affairs through socioeconomic, cultural, and/or political means." While the Wikipedia article goes on to list a set of defining criteria that includes a large mass transit network, it is clear that urban rail does not, by itself, define a city's "worldliness." The Globalization and World Cities Study Group & Network has also taken a stab at defining "world cities", based on a city's international importance relative to the banking, accounting, legal and advertising sectors. The amount of rail a city has no bearing on their methodology. 

While it is true that the four cities most widely accepted to be the top "world cities" - London, New York City, Tokyo and Paris - have extensive rail networks, these rail networks grew over time, as the cities grew in population and importance. These cities have massive urban rail networks *because* they are world-class cities, not the other way around.

4. People who oppose urban rail systems are highway lobby shills.

While it is certainly true that a lot of people prefer that money for urban rail instead be spent on roadways, and there are some groups that specifically exist for this purpose, this is not true of every rail opponent. A lot of people oppose urban rail systems simply because they do not think they are a cost-effective use of public resources, not because they have a vested interest in more highway construction.

I've never understood why the so-called "highway lobby" would fear more investment in urban rail systems, anyway. The amount of public money spent on highway construction dwarfs the amount spent on transit. In 2001, for example, federal, state and local governments combined to spend 86 billion dollars on highways, 22 billion dollars on aviation, and 13 billion on transit. In other words, transit (both bus and rail) accounted for only 10.6% of the total amount of money spent by federal, state and local governments on building, maintaining and operating the nation's transportation system. Rail is practical in only a very limited number of cases and it will never pose a "threat" to the United States' automobile-oriented, dispersed way of life. Therefore, expenditures on transit will never be able to "threaten" expenditures on highways. Furthermore, many, if not most, of the firms that do highway planning, engineering and construction also do rail and transit planning, engineering and construction. They're making money on roads as well as rail and wouldn't have any reason to favor one mode over the other!

5. Transit ridership is increasing at a faster rate than automobile usage.

This statement is technically correct: in terms of passenger miles of movement, travel by transit has grown at a faster rate than travel by automobile in many of the past ten years. Between 1995 and 2000, in fact, passenger miles carried by transit increased 19.7% while passenger miles carried by cars, vans, SUVs and trucks increased by only 13.5%. This increase in transit ridership, incidentally, marked the reversal of a decades-long trend wherein transit ridership actually decreased in the face of low-density suburban growth and increased automobile ownership.

However, while this statement is technically correct, it is, for all practical purposes, misleading.  The absolute amount of travel on our nation's highways, in terms of passenger miles, utterly dwarfs the absolute amount of passenger miles carried by transit. This means that, even if transit travel increased at a larger percentage rate than highway travel, the number of passenger miles gained by highway travel is in absolute terms exponentially higher than the number of passenger miles gained by transit.

Between 1997 and 1998, for example, transit passenger miles grew at a faster rate than highway passenger miles (4.23% as opposed to 2.72%). Translated into to the passenger miles themselves, however, highway travel increased by 111,268 thousand passenger miles over this period of time while transit travel increased by only 1,789 thousand passenger miles: a ratio of about 62 passenger miles to one!

This is not to belittle the importance of transit or to argue that the gains made in transit ridership over the past several years are not important. But, as Anthony Downs explains as he tackles this argument, ìit is also a good idea to retain a statistically accurate and objective understanding of the facts when dealing with such complex and controversial issues, especially those that involve billions of taxpayer dollars.


Ten Arguments Rail Opponents Should Not Use

1. Rail transit brings crime into a community.

Fortunately, this argument isn't heard very often anymore, because even rail opponents are aware of the elitist and even racist connotations associated with it. But there are still people who insist that public transit in general - and rail transit in particular - will bring crime into neighborhoods; some people even derisively refer to light rail as "loot rail" because they believe it will allow criminals easy access to wealthy suburban neighborhoods ripe for robbing. There are even some cities around the nation - Arlington, Texas being a prime example - that have no public transportation system whatsoever due at least in part to crime-related fears.

This "transit = crime" argument is based on the dubious logic that public transportation, by virtue of being accessible to lower-income and inner-city people who are statistically more likely to be criminals, will provide a means by which criminals can easily travel to outlying neighborhoods to rob, mug, rape and pillage. While the suburban workers fill up the inbound trains every morning on their way to work, the inner-city thugs fill up the outbound trains and head out to the 'burbs to do their dirty work. This argument, of course, fails to consider the simple fact that the range of criminals is not limited by public transportation. Most criminals, believe or not, do have access to automobiles and undoubtedly prefer to use automobiles to commit crimes than to get on board a bus or train. How often, after all, do you see seedy-looking individuals nonchalantly getting on board buses or trains carrying loads of televisions, stereos, cameras, jewelry, bicycles and the like? If you're going to burglarize a house, you'd probably want to use a car or a van to carry all the ill-gotten goods and to make a quick getaway.

This argument is simply based on bigoted paranoia and his not grounded in any factual evidence. There are no comprehensive, nationwide studies which indicate that the arrival of transit, by itself, increases crime in a given neighborhood. In the isolated cases where the arrival of rail transit has been accompanied by an increase in crime (i.e. Baltimore, mostly in the form of petty crimes such as shoplifting), better policing and enforcement efforts quickly put an end to the problem.

Communities need to take a proactive stance against crime where ever it occurs, and the way to do that is through planning, outreach and enforcement. In that regard, transit is no different from any other aspect of urban life. To claim that rail transit is bad because attracts criminals, however, is just silly.

Further Reading: Journeys to Crime: Assessing the Effects of a Light Rail Line on Crime in the Neighborhoods

2. Public transportation (bus as well as rail) loses money and requires subsidies. Highways "pay for themselves" through gas taxes and user fees.

While it is true that transit requires subsidies - public transportation, after all, is by definition a not-for-profit enterprise and "loses" money just like police departments, fire departments, parks departments, libraries and other public services "lose" money - the idea that highways "pay for themselves" is simply not true. Highways are subsidized, just like any other form of transportation.

In 2004, the Federal Highway Administration reported that, across all levels of government, "user fees" such as gas taxes, tolls, vehicle registration fees and other fees covered 56.3% of the total cost of building, operating and maintaining streets and highways in the United States. The rest of the money came from sales taxes, property taxes and other non-user-related taxes - in other words, subsidies - as well as from proceeds from bonds and interest and the like.

The relative amount of subsidy given to transit, as opposed to roads, is a valid point of discussion. Maybe transit agencies should strive for higher farebox recovery ratios or find other ways to reduce taxpayer subsidies. On the other hand, maybe there needs to be more of a balance between Federal methods of subsidizing highways and transit.

For further reading on the gas tax and highway financing, see this recent Brookings Institution report.

3. It's cheaper to buy or lease a luxury car like a Lexus or Mercedes, or even a hybrid like a Toyota Prius, for each new person attracted to transit by ride light rail than it is to build an urban rail line.

This analogy makes for a great sound bite and is commonly used among rail critics. But it's also profoundly flawed. It compares the full cost of construction of a rail system, with maintenance facilities, trackway, power supply, vehicles and stations, to the purchase price of an automobile. In order for this comparison to be anything close to valid, the cost of the roads on which those luxury cars drive must be taken into account. Consider that it now costs somewhere between $7 million and $10 million per lane mile to build a new freeway in an urban area (exclusive of interchanges), and the true cost of the infrastructure required to support said Lexus or Mercedes quickly becomes apparent.

But that's not all. In order for this comparison to be truly accurate, the cost of the parking lots and garages to store those luxury cars, the cost of the gas stations to supply fuel to those luxury cars, and the cost of the repair shops needed to service those luxury cars also need to be included. This analogy also fails to consider that cars wear out after a few years and need to be replaced, while light rail tracks, stations and cars can last for decades before replacement.

It is one thing for rail opponents to argue that rail transit is too expensive to be cost-effective. But they tend to lose credibility when they use faulty reasoning and "fuzzy math" exaggerate the truth to levels such as these.

4. The amount of capacity provided by a rail line is less than that of a single freeway lane.

Here is another "fuzzy math" argument that some rail opponents like to use. It is based on the theoretical maximum capacity of a freeway lane, which is anywhere between 2,000 and 2,500 vehicles per hour, depending on which transportation engineer you ask. For example, if we assume a maximum capacity of 2,000 vehicles per lane per hour and an average vehicle occupancy rate of 1.6 (for all trips, according to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey), a single freeway lane's maximum person-carrying capacity over a 24-hour period is almost 77,000. According to APTA's own light, heavy and commuter rail ridership reports, very few urban rail systems carry that amount of people per day, let alone a single line. How can you argue with that?

Well, here's the problem: as was noted, this is the theoretical maximum capacity of a highway lane. But highway lanes are only used to their maximum capacities a few hours a day (namely, the AM and PM peak periods); nobody complains about traffic congestion at 3 in the morning. The amount of vehicles (and people) that a single freeway lane carries in a 24-hour period is generally much less. The problem gets worse when these theoretical capacities are compared to the actual ridership of a given rail line - an apples-to-oranges comparison if there ever was one.

The best way to compare the carrying capacities of freeway lanes with rail is to look at what they actually handle during their peak period of usage. And rail wins that comparison, hands-down. For example, a recent report by North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) notes that DARTís light rail system moves 7,374 people during peak hour in the peak direction (i.e. inbound during the AM rush and outbound during the PM rush). A single freeway lane, by contrast, move 2,300 people. In other words, during the rush hour, when it matters most, a single rail line moves as many people as three lanes of freeway traffic.

Case closed.

5. Public transportation carries less than two percent of all trips.

After World War II, as residences and employment have suburbanized, real incomes have risen and automobile ownership has increased, the number of people using transit has declined. So it is, unfortunately, true that transit only accounts for a very small percentage of all trips. (It's also true that these trends have also occurred at least in part to massive and oftentimes government-subsidized market distortions favoring automobile transit over public transportation, such as the Interstate Highway Act, FHA mortgage insurance practices ["red-lining"] which encouraged low-density suburban growth, "urban renewal" programs that systematically destroyed transit-friendly inner-city neighborhoods, and zoning codes that segregated land uses, restricted densities and mandated minimum parking requirements, but that's a completely different argument.) Due to the decentralized nature of our cities, and the limited geographic reach of transit networks (e.g. buses only run on something like four percent of the nation's roadways), there are a lot of trips that are simply impossible to make on public transportation.

However, the "two percent" argument is misleading and unfair. This statistic is generally produced by dividing the number of trips transit carries by the total number of trips which occur in a given metropolitan area, including freight trips, service trips, and other types of trips that could not possibly be made by transit. Furthermore, this total number of trips is usually based on a 24-hour period, even though transit services usually don't operate all day and all night long. Finally, the number of total trips oftentimes will be based on an entire metropolitan region, even if the transit authority doesn't serve the entire region.

It is certainly true that the low percentage of trips carried by transit - rail as well as bus - is a reasonable and legitimate criticism of public transportation. But if you're going to critique transit's "mode split," at least be fair about it. Don't try to dilute the effectiveness of public transportation by comparing the number of trips it carries against a bunch of trips that it can't carry. When possible, compare apples to apples: what is public transit's mode split for trips that are transit competitive, i.e. trips that could be made by bus or train as well as by automobile?

In this regard, specific passenger trips like journey-to-work trips are a better measure of transit usage. According to the US Census, in 2000 4.7 percent of the labor force used public transportation to get to work. This is a nationwide average; in individual cities the mode split was even higher. In the City of Houston, for example, 5.9 percent of the workforce used transit to commute to work. Not great, but not "less than two percent," either. In Los Angeles, 10 percent of the workforce used transit. In Portland, Oregon, the mode split was just over 12 percent. In Atlanta, 15 percent. Chicago, 26 percent. The District of Columbia, 33 percent. New York City, which has the nation's most extensive transit network has a commuter mode split of 53 percent. 

The percentages of commuters using transit to get to work are even higher in areas with high employment concentrations, such as downtowns and other major activity centers. These are the kinds of commuter markets that transit is meant to serve, and oftentimes transit serves them well.

6. As the recent bombings on trains in Madrid and London have shown, rail is a terrorist target. Therefore, rail systems should not be built because they will attract terrorist activity.

If you're going to use this as an argument against urban rail, then you logically should be arguing for the nation's commercial aviation system to be shut down as well. After all, the 9/11 hijackers used commercial airliners to wreak their havoc.

The ugly truth about terrorism is that it sees *everything* as a potential terrorist target: schools, hospitals, shopping malls and other places where large numbers of people congregate are just as vulnerable to some lunatic suicide bomber as a rail line. Palestinian suicide bombers have attacked hotels and restaurants in Israel. Chechen terrorists have targeted theaters and schools in Russia. Here in the United States, government office buildings and crowded parks have been terrorist targets. Yet nobody is saying that these types of "targets" shouldn't be built lest they attract terrorists. It's just not logical to single out rail as something that should not be built due to its potential to attract terrorism.

Terrorism, unfortunately, is a fact of modern life, and it requires us to be vigilant at all times. We have to watch for unattended bags and suspicious activities or people wherever we go, whether it be at the airport, in the shopping mall or on the train. 

7. Rail is more dangerous than buses or cars.

This argument seems a bit strange, considering that almost 43 thousand people were killed on our nation's highways in one year alone (2003). However, rail opponents come up with this argument rather easily: they simply divide the number of rail-related fatalities by the number of passenger-miles carried by rail and compare the result to the number to the number of fatalities per bus or automobile passenger-miles. The mathematical result is that rail has a higher fatality rate per passenger-mile than bus or automobile. How can you argue with that?

Well, there are two problems here. First of all, the entire premise that the safety of various modes of transportation should be based on fatalities per passenger-mile is highly debatable because most of the people who are killed in bus or train accidents are not passengers. Oftentimes, they are pedestrians who don't obey crossing signals. In many cases, they are suicides. Perhaps a better measurement of modal safety is the number of accidents which occur per capita in a metropolitan area. By that measurement, rail is much safer than buses or cars.

Secondly, the use of passenger-miles as a basis for comparison tends to distort the data, because the number of passenger-miles carried by cars, trucks and SUVs is far greater than that carried by rail. For example, going back to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, we find that in 2003, a total of 31,904 occupants (drivers or passengers) died in car, light truck or SUV accidents on our nation's highways. Since cars, light trucks and SUVs accounted for 4,354.3 billion passenger miles traveled, the resulting death rate per billion passenger miles is 7.42. This number would be even higher if pedestrian fatalities (4,749 in 2003) were added in. Meanwhile, only 13 people were killed in light rail-related accidents. However, since light rail only carried 1,476 billion passenger-miles in 2003, the result is a death rate of 8.81 per billion passenger-miles. Therefore, it appears that light rail is less safe than automobiles, even though in absolute terms the number of people killed in automobile accidents is over 2,450 times greater than the number of people killed in light rail accidents! Remember what Mark Twain said about "lies, damned lies and statistics?"

Finally, even if the safety of rail, buses or cars is measured and compared on a passenger-mile basis, urban rail, as a whole, is much safer than automobiles. Light rail has a comparatively high death rate per passenger-mile because it generally operates at grade, usually along city streets or within transit malls, and encounters involving cars or pedestrians are unfortunately inevitable. Heavy (or "rapid") rail, on the other hand, usually operates in subway or above-grade, and commuter rail operates within its own right-of-way (or in right-of-way shared by freight movements). This tends to significantly increase safety. As a result, the 46 fatalities associated with the nation's urban rail network in 2003, divided by the 27,341 billion passenger-miles of movement carried by urban rail, results in an overall fatality rate per billion passenger-miles of rail travel of 1.68!

Transit buses, by comparison, sustained 73 fatalities in 2003 and carried 21,262 billion passenger-miles of movement. The resulting fatality rate is 3.43 per billion passenger-miles. By this measurement, rail as a whole is actually safer than buses and much safer than cars. Even the Federal Highway Administration acknowledges that "currently, transit is one of the safest modes of travel per passenger miles traveled."

8. Most American cities are not dense enough to support urban rail projects.

Density is usually measured in terms of population (or housing, or employment) per square mile (or square kilometer, or acre). While it is true that rail transit is indispensable in cities with high population densities (e.g. New York, London, Paris, Tokyo), it is not necessarily true that urban rail needs high population densities in order to be supported.

This is because there is a difference between population (or employment) densities and traffic (or vehicluar) densitites. In regards to transportation infrastructure, the latter is more important than the former. Even a city with a relatively low overall population or employment densities could have a specific corridor that sees a lot of traffic; for example, a freeway that serves downtown (or some other major activity center) from the suburbs may see a high degree of traffic density, especially during the AM or PM rush hour. The level of traffic density (generally defined as the number of passenger-miles per route mile) along this route might justify some type of transit infrastructure, including rail, especially if it were tied to suburban park-and-ride facilities (after all, not everybody walks to bus stops or rail stations, even though the "cities are not dense enough to support rail" argument tends to imply such).

To be fair, rail is not automatically appropriate in every situation (and an interesting discussion of the level of traffic density that is required to support rail can be found here). In some cases dedicated bus / HOV lanes might be more appropriate response to high-traffic-density corridors. The point is that a city's overall density in terms of population, employment or housing is not an indicator of urban rail's ability to be effective; rather, it is traffic density - the amount of people traveling along a particular route - that's important.

9. People who support the construction of urban rail systems are anti-car; they want to force people out of their cars and onto trains.

Every now and then, rail opponents who have otherwise exhausted their ammunition will toss out this ad-hominem zinger. Unfortunately for them, it's not true. I have yet to meet an urban rail proponent, be it a transportation planner, an engineer, a transit authority bureaucrat, a politician or otherwise, who was "anti-car." Everybody, rail proponents included, realizes that the automobile has become the staple of mobility in the United States and that any attempt to "rid our cities of cars" is fruitless and nonsensical. What rail proponents do believe is possible, however, is that a comprehensive transit system that includes rail where warranted can give people more transportation options and in turn reduce dependence on automobiles. The aim of transit authorities is not to force people out of their cars, but rather to encourage alternatives to total automobile dependency.

Some rail critics (usually of the libertarian variety) even take this argument a bit farther and claim that rail projects are little more than attempts at social engineering which are aimed at reversing market preferences, which overwhwelmingly tilt towards automobile ownership and use as well as sprawling, low-density suburban housing patterns. Of course, as I've noted in the previous argument, the reason today's cities are dominated by cars and sprawling, characterless suburbs is precisely due to Federal social engineering strategies of the 1950s variety, such as the Interstate Highway System and post-war mortgage lending practices.

10. Rail is 19th-century technology that is ill-suited for the 21st-century city.

I've saved the lamest anti-rail argument for last. It's not just the pro-road, anti-rail folks who believe that the automobile is the pinnacle of human transportation technology that make this claim, either; itís also uttered by the "alternate technology fans" who would rather see monorails or maglev trains than light rail. This argument implies that all technology has an "expiration date" of some sort and that rail, because it was invented so long ago, has "expired" and needs to be replaced with newer technology.

What a load of crap! If a certain type of technology gets the job done, then it's still perfectly valid. Rail has been getting the job (moving large volumes of people) done for over a century and it still does as good a job today as it did back in the 1800s. Why should the fact that it was developed so long ago be a drawback?

Hey, the internal combustion engine was invented in the 19th century, too. According to this logic, we should do away with cars! And walking is millenia-old transportation technology. I guess we need to quit building sidewalks and making shoes, too? Get real!

By the way: several technlogical advancements, such as continously-welded rails, faster, more efficient motors, electronic controls, computerized signal systems and even air conditioning, have made modern light rail much more advanced than its streetcar predecessors of a century ago. The "19th-century technology" that is rail is constantly being updated, and for that reason it is just as practical today as it was 150 years ago.

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