The American Public Transport System - what went wrong?

The US spends so much money on public transport, but it often seems so terrible given that almost every human has a car to commute from one place to another. American buses, subways and light rails have consistently lower ridership rates, fewer service hours and longer waits between trains than those in virtually every comparable wealthy European and Asian country. At the same time, a much greater percentage of US public transit costs are subsidized by the US Tax Payer's money. So what is the real issue here?

Many people try to explain this paradox - paying more for transit and getting far less benefits - by pointing to US history and geography. Most of their cities and suburbs were built out of the 1950's when the car/ automobile became the dominant mode of transportation. Consequently, they have sprawling, autocentric metropolises that just cannot be easily served by public transport. For the same geography as the US, Canada is doing much better when it comes to public transit systems - when you compare Seattle to Vancouver, or Salt Lake to Edmonton, or Des Moines to Winnipeg, culturally and economically, they are very similar cities - but each Canadian city has 2x-5x as much transit service per capita - so, there's correspondingly more ridership per capita. Although history and geography are partly to blame, there's a deeper reason why American public transport is so terrible. European, Asian and Canadian cities treat it as a vital public utility. Most American policymakers - and voters - see transit as a social welfare program rather than a township development.

Suburban sprawl is only a part of the whole problem. When you visit and compare with a popular European city (esp. Geneva where I lived for close to 2 months) with excellent public transport, the problem may seem obvious - America's sprawling , car-based development. Most American cities - especially those outside the Northeast and the Rust Belt - are relatively new and so, they were built mainly with the car in mind. They're sprawled out, with cul-de-sac-heavy suburbs instead of a much tighter grid. All this makes cost-efficient and fast transit way more difficult. After all, it costs more for a rail or bus line to serve the same number of people spread across a wider area. Highways, curving roads and cul-de-sacs also make it difficult to reach bus stops, metro stations and other destinations on foot. This is what I really mean by that.

The fact that older US cities have pre-war street grids (like NYC, SFO and Chicago) have the highest levels of US transit ridership seems to support the above argument. But, that isn't the whole story - a closer look at transportation history shows that other countries combined suburbs with better transit. Most countries - the US, UK, Canada, France, Australia - in the 1950s were all on the same trajectory towards automobile dependence. In the 1960s, they diverged - many cities in Europe did their best to preserve existing transit systems and expand them to growing suburbs. Separately, newer cities in Western Canada invested more in light rail lines and quality bus service even as they were being designed for automobiles. As a result, all these places still have much higher transit ridership levels than the US cities of comparable size and density. In the US, newer cities in the West and South expanded without nearly the same level of corresponding investment into public transport. Even some of the country's existing big cities - which had been laid out well before the car - willfully destroyed their existing transit systems, ripping out streetcar lines and building highways to speed commutes from the suburbs. 

This divergence between the US and Europe can be traced to the 1950s municipal takeover in many US cities of the private streetcar and bus companies which had largely gone bankrupt. The companies were locked into contracts that prohibited them from raising their fares and required them to maintain the roads, while increasing levels of car traffic made streetcars painfully slow. When cities took over these companies, it was with the idea that they'd maintain these systems as a sort of welfare service to those who couldn't afford to drive. Outside of a handful of cities like DC/ NYC, that mentality has remained in place. Nowadays, many local politicians don't see transit as a vital transportation function - instead, they think of it as a government aid program to help the poor who lack the ability to buy cars. On one hand, this mentality has led cities to heavily subsidize public transit: no more than 30-40% of operating costs are covered by fares. The huge downside here is that it prevents local agencies from charging high fares to provide efficient service, effectively limiting transit to the poor. This is one of the main reasons why so many US cities' bus and rail systems have relatively extensive networks and many stops - have limited operating hours and frequency. It doesn't need to be that way though - transit systems in cities like London, have higher fares and more frequent service, making them attractive options for people who own cars. In theory, there's no reason this couldn't work in the US - the question remains how do cities get away with charging higher fares while still making sure poor people have reliable transportation - in Paris, for instance, each municipality (Arrondisement) is legally obligated to pay the transit agency the difference between its fares and operating costs, allowing it to strive for an efficient service while keeping fares down. Cities like Seattle have experimented with charging cheaper fares for people with low income. 

So, you may ask, is there a way we can improve US public transit? In attracting riders to transit, frequency is the biggest thing, followed by reliability - else, people won't trust the system. Other countries have managed to improve both these measures without spending more money - but in the US, the idea that transit is welfare has prevented this sort of innovation. Bus stops in the US are spaced very close to each other, compared to other countries. Spreading them out would increase bus speed and frequency, but it can be politically difficult because it has been seen as harming seniors and disabled riders. In Europe, much higher numbers of them ride buses with greater stop spacing - because, the buses come more often and are more reliable. Other sorts of cost-neutral changes include routing buses so as to ease transfers from one part of the city to another, rather than forcing all riders to transfer downtown, and increasing bus service in more heavily populated areas, while sacrificing the total number of stops. After so many years, there is reason for optimism - US transit ridership has gradually been ticking upwards, even though it is nowhere near European levels. Some experts are optimistic that transit agencies are becoming more willing to experiment. Houston implemented multiple changes to its bus lines, making the system less oriented towards downtown and increasing the ease of transferring to go from one suburb to another.