American cities are facing a transportation crisis. There’s terrible traffic. Public transit doesn’t work or go where people need it to. The cities are growing, but newcomers are faced with the prospects of paying high rents for reasonable commutes or lower rents for dreary, frustrating daily treks. Nearly all Americans, including those in cities, face a dire choice: spend thousands of dollars a year owning a car and sitting in traffic, or sacrifice hours every day on ramshackle public transit getting where they need to go. Things are so broken that, increasingly, they do both. Nationwide, three out of every four commuters drive alone. The rate in metro areas is not much different. … This is a crisis facing American cities right now in 2020, but it’s an old crisis. The only thing that has changed is the problem has gotten worse.
There is no single cause. Our cities, and our federal government, have made a lot of mistakes. Some were obvious at the time, others only in hindsight, but most have been a combination of the two. We keep doing things that stopped being good ideas a long time ago. Many of those mistakes have to do with housing policy, which is inextricably linked to transportation policy. But the most obvious cause of our transportation crisis is a simple one: America sucks at building public transportation. Why is this? Why does the U.S. suck at building good, useful public transit?
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We keep doing things that stopped being good ideas
a long time ago. |
The tangle of American governmental dysfunction is so profound, digging into it can feel like undoing a rubber band ball with your teeth. But the failure itself is simple and obvious. It’s apparent to anyone who has traveled abroad in the last several decades. Whether it’s traditional subway and commuter rail systems, modern streetcars and light rails, high-speed intercity rail, or even the humble bus with dedicated lanes and train-like stops, the U.S. lags perilously behind. It is a national embarrassment and a major reason our cities are less pleasant, more expensive places to live.
Over the last 30 years, almost two dozen countries have built true high-speed rail networks. The U.S. has a grand total of 34 miles of high-speed track. This isn’t to say the U.S. has built nothing in the same time period. The U.S. spent more than $47 billion on 1,200 miles of new and expanded transit lines in the decade from 2010 to 2019 (most of that mileage has been on bus routes). That may sound like a lot, and at first glance it can seem like the U.S. has made some progress. There are now 93 miles of light rail in Dallas, 60 miles in Portland, and 87.5 combined light and commuter rail miles in Denver. Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, San Diego, Sacramento, Phoenix, and others can cite similar improvements. For all their flaws, these are transit systems that didn’t exist 40 years ago. But these systems, with the possible exception of Portland’s, do have one thing in common: they’re not especially useful because they’re not big enough and don’t go where people need them to.
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Photo by Donald Tong from Pexels
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There is, of course, no simple answer why our transportation systems are broken. Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken. If you don’t feel like descending into the transit nerd tunnel with me, here’s the tl;dr version:
“[The U.S.] needs to learn what works in Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Taiwan, Finland, Austria,” [Alon] Levy wrote. “It needs to learn how to plan around cooperation between different agencies and operators, how to integrate infrastructure and technology, how to use 21st-century engineering.” … “Imitate,” Levy advises. “Don’t innovate.”
- Everything costs too much.
- We build highways instead.
- We don't plan well.
- People don't trust the government to build things so they vote against projects under the assumption they will be executed poorly and waste taxpayer dollars.
- We don't give transit agencies enough money to run good service which erodes political support to have more of it.
- There are too many agencies at all levels of government, especially at the local level, and not enough coordination between them.
- Our newer cities are sprawled out which makes good transit hard, and our older cities are too paralyzed by political dysfunction to expand the systems they have.
- As a result of generations of privatization efforts by all levels of government, in the rare event we do actually get to build stuff there is not enough expertise within the agencies to do it well.
“[The U.S.] needs to learn what works in Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Taiwan, Finland, Austria,” [Alon] Levy wrote. “It needs to learn how to plan around cooperation between different agencies and operators, how to integrate infrastructure and technology, how to use 21st-century engineering.” … “Imitate,” Levy advises. “Don’t innovate.”
Excerpted from the original.