Letters to the Editor
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Not a breakthrough
Is this really a new thought? Making the hearts of cities accessible to surburbanites and their cars clearly had much to do with the decline of public transportation. News flash: It also contributed to white flight and the near-death of the American inner city.
Of course, appropriate blame must be laid at the feet of car companies like GM, who bought up public transit companies with the clear, if implicit, intention of running them so poorly everyone would take to their cars.
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Economic Factors Force Behavior
Wow - I guess all the public announcements and campaigns about the benefits of public transport have fallen on deaf ears until Americans actually need to use public transport to make ends meet.
Who would have thunk? I thought only poor people ride the bus because they're the only smart people.
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public transit for non-traditional uses
I have the ultimate in commute-free jobs--I work at home, and commute upstairs in my socks. Gotta work hard not to trip over the dog who likes to snooze on the landing.
However, I occasionally need to go downtown in the middle of the day to see a client. I'd love to take public transit, except for two factors.
First, all the park and ride lots in the burbs fill up by 8:00 a.m. at the latest, so that option is out.
Second, the suburban midday buses run so infrequently that they're nearly useless. I could literally waste half a day waiting for buses when I could be working.
So instead I'm stuck with my car in the downtown core in the middle of the workday, hunting for an overpriced parking place in a lot or a building.
In most cities I know of, public transit is great if you work in the urban core, you live out some distance from it, and you work traditional 8-5 hours. Anyone else is pretty much on their own or wasting hours waiting for buses.
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The issue isn't the automobile -- it's the PRIVATE automobile
While train and bus ridership is going up, in this day and age the contest shouldn't be between the automobile and the larger modes of transportation. Rather, the problem is the private auto -- which is used only part of the day, causes traffic congestion and parking problems, and the like. The larger forms of vehicle (busses, for example) have their own problems, because they are forced to run on fixed schedules and must have heavier ridership to be economical.
Today, with mobile phones, computers, and "smart cards," there should be no more private autos. Autos should be rented by the minute (that is, when used), dropped off in public lots and picked up anywhere, reserved online by computer, and the like. Companies like Zipcar have this model available, but they are very small -- but that is the wave of the future. A mix of easily rentable cars, plus larger forms of transportation -- that is what will lower greenhouse gas emissions, help solve energy problems, and lower traffic issues. Why aren't we going there?
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Where the hell has Andrew Leonard been? He's a journalist?
This blows my mind. This issue has been well-known for years. Eisenhower signed a bill!?
How about General Motors/Firestone Tires and the Federal Government colluding to dismantle all the light rail systems in the US? Los Angeles used to have a bunch?
More people dependent on public transportation years ago? Duh. Would it ever occur to Andrew that most families had ONE car, IF they had a car?
What the hell....
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cars will always win over centralized transport
by giving the owner:
greater economic freedoms (stores, food sources, services, recreation, and health care)
control over time. (go when you want, less transit time)
control over distance. (easy travel to places more than a 10 minute walk from a bus stop)
access to cheaper living spaces.
escape from urban life and crime.
decentralized transport will always win for the same reason the internet won over the centralized phone company model. cars view public transport as damage and route around it.
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There is one superb government-funded public transporation system ...
... and people avoid using it as quickly as they can. Alas.
I refer, of course, to public school buses, which in much of the country are required, by law, to come within a short distance of your home exactly when you need them to get to your destination at the right time. Imagine if your employer provided *that*!
But go to your local high school and check students' frenzy to get parking permits as soon as they've got their drivers license. The cost, inconvenience and pollution of driving yourself to school pales in comparison to the freedom and convenience.
That's why I have little hope that public transportation will ever make a huge dent in our country.
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Duh!
People were generally poorer in the 1950s!!
Plus many had the beginnings of their careers delayed by the war.
Just as today, no one but the poor, the infirm and those who live in a downtown morass WANTS to use public transit.
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Some very smart and very expensive sabotage did.
Funny, I was just looking at an essay on this very topic and thinking about this very thing. As this essay (on my site at my company, not coincidentally called Streetcar Press) articulates, it took many millions of dollars and a great deal of fraud and fancy talk to create our current situation. As the Snell Report documented back in the seventies and as mentioned by the other commentors, General Motors, Firestone, and a bunch of their friends worked from the nineteen-twenties on to subvert public transit in this country. They falsified records, placed their products in movies, and overall suckered us out of over a trillion dollars worth of our heritage.
You can find the essay here:
http://www.streetcarpress.com/essays/great_trillion-dollar_swindle.html
I think that the photo the author tracked down speaks for itself and, no, it is not doctored.
The movies Taken For a Ride and, before it, Who Killed Roger Rabbit seem to have helped some in the recent rebounding. But mostly I think that it has been the real estate companies who have discovered and acted on the fact that property is worth more money and return on investment is smoother and faster when public transit is nearby, well-funded, and runs frequently and long hours. The American corporate raiders did their best to destroy public transit. These days the faster and wealthier commercial investors look to be playing a real role in bringing it back.