Why the US sucks at building public transit
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The reason the US sucks as building public transportation is that Americans do not want blacks in their neighborhood.
That view also fails to explain the costs of building transit in places that already have large minority populations. Why does it cost NYC 5-7x as much to build a unit length of subway as London or Paris? Why was the DC light rail such a money pit? Maryland is building a light rail between two high income DC suburbs. It will cost as much to build above-ground, not grade separated light rail along existing streets in the suburbs as it did for Denmark to build a fully automated, fully underground system of similar length under Copenhagen.
Including where you live. Real estate is devalued in Prince Georges County because its population is largely black. Why is it largely black? Because white flight.
Public transportation in the US is inefficient because it is underutilized even where it exists (nyc notwithstanding). Riding a bus carries stigma that is racial as well as economic and this leads to transportation systems that few use, reinforcing a notion that they are wasteful and inefficient.
The true metric for comparison is not what a public transportation system costs to build, but how many people per capita use it. That’s where Americans show their stripes.
I’ve lived and ridden public transportation in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Germany, Japan and NYC. This is a sociological problem, not a technical or financial one.
Sure. But you’ve done nothing to connect that to the issue being discussed here, which is the inability of Americans to build public transit efficiently.
> Including where you live. Real estate is devalued in Prince Georges County because its population is largely black. Why is it largely black? Because white flight.
It’s actually a particularly early and successful example of Black flight (where middle class Black people leave to city to head to the suburbs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight. It was majority Black until the turn of the century, became majority white, and then became majority Black until the 1990s. But it’s population has never decreased since the 1900 census.
Prince George’s County is an archetypal American suburb. McMansions, Target, Whole Foods, strip malls, etc., and no public transit. Because that’s just what Americans like, regardless of race.
> Public transportation in the US is inefficient because it is underutilized even where it exists (nyc notwithstanding).
No, American public transit is inefficient because it costs multiples of what it costs to build in other countries, especially in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... And operating costs for the NYC subway are about double that of the London Tube, a very similar system.
> Riding a bus carries stigma that is racial as well as economic and this leads to transportation systems that few use, reinforcing a notion that they are wasteful and inefficient.
That may be true for buses, but trains carry no such stigma. The median income of people on most DC metro lines is six figures. It’s been heavily used by professionals and government workers since its inception. Prior to COVID, it was packed to capacity. But it’s still enormously wasteful and inefficient.
That’s the basic problem with your theory. Maybe that’s a plausible explanation for why there is no public transit in say Atlanta. But there are several major cities where public transit is heavily used by higher income and shire people (New York, Chicago, and DC at least). And it’s vastly inefficient in those places too, compared to Europe. And it’s also vastly inefficient in cities that lack the “white flight” racial dynamic because they have very few Black people, like Seattle and Portland. Your theory just can’t hold up to the counter examples.
> The true metric for comparison is not what a public transportation system costs to build, but how many people per capita use it.
What transit costs to build is the key metric. If Danes can build a fully automated subway for $200 million per mile, and New Yorkers can build it fir $1 billion per mile—and these are actual numbers—then for the same cost the Danes can build five times as much subway. That has two effects. That means you can build transit that gets near to the housing of five times as many people. So the same cost is amortized over five times as many potential riders. But there is a compounding effect too. The more extensive network is more useful to each of those five times as many potential riders (more likely to go where they want to go)—making it more likely that each of the potential riders will become actual riders.
Google what MARTA stands for to white southerners. And it’s not just a joke - in Atlanta, until very recently, proximity to a train station would suppress the value of your home!
While we may be talking past each other, I posit that if a Danish-style system were built where America needs it the most, on a Danish budget, many Americans would relocate before living someplace that made it easy for “all kinds of people” to ride into their neighborhood.
Many, many Americans don’t want public transportation but to say their primary concern is budgetary is incorrect - even if that’s the argument they make.
I lived in Atlanta, and I’m aware of that. Contrary to your theory, Atlanta is actually one of the better-run train systems in the country. (Stellar on-time performance, isn’t suffering from the maintenance apocalypse of the DC Metro system.)
But that’s totally different here in DC. Living near a metro station has been a big plus ever since we moved to the area. My dad used to take the Metro to Arlington from Vienna, starting in 1989. Nearly everyone on those trains were college educated professionals. But the DC metro has been a disaster budget and maintenance wise. They had to shut down the self-driving feature (which made rides extremely smooth) because the support infrastructure had been allowed to decay. And it’s not for a lack of funding.
The very same brilliant Republican Governor Scott Walker did however offer massive state subsidies to Foxconn to build a factory here... which Foxconn never actually did. The whole thing turned out to be a giant scam.
Taxpayer subsidized services for corporations? Hell yes! Taxpayer subsidized services for individuals? Hell no! The irony is that building public infrastructure would actually create jobs, which was the nominal justification for the factory.
Public transport blows as an idea here simply cause everyone likes cars. As a fellow wisconsinite, I hate them with a passion. I can't be bothered with the maintenance and knowledge of it. Cars are just money pits. But cause the whole state is so sparsely laid out in every city, public transport has got another 1 people million per city to go before they start toying with it more.