Nashville is growing. It’s gridlocked. Car commuters in the Grand Ole Stopry spend an average of 33 hours a year stuck in traffic. And its voters just shot down a $5.2 billion transit improvement plan.

Supporters of the referendum—including the mayor, the local Metropolitan Transit Authority, and various pro-transit groups—billed it as a necessary fix if the city is to continue growing without becoming ever more clogged, rein in hazardous emissions, and make it easier for everyone, including those who can't drive, to get around.

A yes vote would have given Nashville and its surrounding metropolitan area 26 miles of light rail, four new rapid bus lines, four crosstown bus lines, improved service on existing buses, 19 transit centers, and a suite of improvements to signals, sidewalks, and bike infrastructure. But last week, voters in Davidson County, which includes Music City USA and its environs, said 'heck naw.' By a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

Opponents of the plan focused on the not-insignificant tax increases, much of which would pay for a light rail system that wouldn’t serve all of the county’s sprawling suburbs. Even worse, the plan wouldn’t ease traffic, at least not in the short term.

That makes sense, except for the fact that sprawling, car-dedicated cities dealing with growth and traffic are making the sorts of moves Nashville just rejected. In 2016 ballot initiatives, voters in Seattle, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles approved expensive transit upgrades in the hopes of dialing down congestion.

The real reason Nashville’s vote failed, then, might have less to do with what was offered and more with how it was framed. And it could provide a helpful lesson for other car-choked cities looking for air.

Red-Light District

In Nashville, like in most American cities that have spent the past six decades paving themselves into the same pickle, traffic is not just egregious—it is inescapable. Nashville’s plan would have offered an alternative to people who would gladly give up driving if there were another way to get around. Its opponents landed their best blow by arguing all these bus lines and light rail wouldn’t actually cut traffic for everyone who stayed behind the wheel. And they were likely right.

“We have a lot of experience showing you can throw billions into public transit, and for the most part it doesn’t put a dent into car trips,” says Robert Cervero, a transportation expert at UC Berkeley. Blame induced demand: Whatever slack is left from people abandoning their cars for transit is eventually taken up by new drivers, enticed by any empty capacity on the roads.

Nashville’s pro-transiteers knew this and tried to make the point. As for why it didn’t stick, one could point to the antitransit blitz funded by Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, including messages like “Highest Sales Tax in the Nation AND It Won’t Fix Traffic.” Or maybe those people in the suburbs were just acting out of self-interest. “You can’t easily reverse 50 years of rapid, low-density development by laying track and tossing in a bunch of bus lines,” Cervero says.

Public transportation works best in dense corridors, where lots of people live, work, and spend money. That makes it an awkward fit for a sprawling place like Nashville. “Whenever you talk about transit, you get a lot of chicken and egg arguments,” says Jeff Wood, a San Francisco-based transportation consultant who writes the transit blog The Overhead Wire. “Like, ‘We don’t have the density, so let’s not build,’ or ‘Let’s build it so we get the density we want.’”