old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn't exist.
new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn't that common in China
20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.
The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction & rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.
This isn't quite true for many of the big cities of interest. There was an active high-modernist effort in the ~70s to destroy the walkable, transitable, livable parts of many American cities and cut freeways across them like big ugly neighborhood-destroying scars.
Even transit wastelands like LA had an actual urban core (that they're now rebuilding), as well as a relatively extensive network of streetcars.
Los Angeles area had very advanced light railway system including Los Angeles Railway and Pacific Electric Railway Company up until 1960s.
Check the map of Pacific Electric Railway Company, and you can see a railway running on the beach from Hermosa Beach up to Santa Monica. The famous Venice Beach Bike Path was originally what the Pacific Electric Railway Company rail used to be. Can you imagine light rails ON the beach in SoCal?
All the rails were torn up after lobbying by oil/tire companies. :(
I've heard that story plenty of times, but I have my doubts, which increase over time. I think people simply didn't like streetcars once buses were available. I think streetcars were seen as a horrible, dangerous, inconvenient technology with massive infrastructure costs.
The first crack in my belief was a comment by a former Baltimore fire chief (I think) who had worked as a streetcar and bus driver earlier. He talked about how scary it was to operate a streetcar with its very poor braking, and how during the transition period every operator was jumping at the chance to become a bus driver.
I'm sure there's a grain of truth in there, about lobbying - but was it really the decisive factor? Could Amazon lobby and get Ebay shut down? Did landline phones fade away because of lobbying from the cellular industry?
Streetcars were a very cool idea but unfortunately motor buses were better in every objective way.
>I've heard that story plenty of times, but I have my doubts,
It's not a story, it's a goddamn historical fact[1].
>I'm sure there's a grain of truth in there, about lobbying - but was it really the decisive factor?
Of course not just lobbying, but also immense loads of corruption and monopoly practices[1].
>Streetcars were a very cool idea but unfortunately motor buses were better in every objective way.
Yeah, that's why streetcars in Europe were all replaced by buses just like the were in the US, and nobody builds "light rail" (read: streetcar systems) anymore anywhere.
Oh wait, exactly the opposite is true, because, well, street cars work, and[1].
The real reason you don't see streetcars is that the benefits of a public transit system are externalities[2], and so they must be funded by the government.
Streetcars were never simply not funded by the government in the way highways are funded -- because of things like [1] -- and so they were destroyed by companies that made [1] happen.
> The real reason you don't see streetcars is that the benefits of a public transit system are externalities[2], and so they must be funded by the government.
I don't follow your logic here. Seems like two different issues. First, should transit be subsidized based on positive externalities. Second, which technology will best deliver that transit. Are these issues coupled somehow? I think they are independent.
In the US, we often have government-operated buses that are heavily subsidized. If streetcars were a better option, the transportation authority could use them.Whether subsidized or not, whether public or private, you presumably have a decision maker looking to deliver transit of a certain grade at the lowest cost.
So if all the historical rails and overhead wires were still intact, I'm guessing that today's transit authorities would make the same decision as the transit companies did back in the day, which is switch over to motor buses and either dismantle or neglect the expensive infrastructure.
Of course there would be a few exceptions; very heavily used routes, and places where non-economic reasons would intervene.
Now the wikipedia page you linked presents a much more nuanced view than what you advocated. In fact it contains a lot to support my skepticism, particularly under "Other Factors" and "Counterarguments". For instance:
> "GM Killed the Red cars in Los Angeles".[84] Pacific Electric Railway (which operated the 'red cars') was hemorrhaging routes as traffic congestion worsened with growing car ownership levels after the end of World War II.[88]
And most tellingly:
> GM's alleged conspiracy extended to only about 10% of American transit systems
So the other 90% shut down the street car lines without any arm twisting from GM. Sounds like all system operators saw the same economic picture.
I'm not wedded to my theory (change driven by evolving technology) but I'm even more skeptical of your theory (change driven by conspiracy).
~
The podcast 99% Invisible had a story on "The Great Red Car Conspiracy" which covers this. As with most issues, it looks like it is more complex (and interesting) than first appears.
> I'm sure there's a grain of truth in there, about lobbying - but was it really the decisive factor? Could Amazon lobby and get Ebay shut down? Did landline phones fade away because of lobbying from the cellular industry?
Streetcar companies were bought up by GM proxy companies and dismantled. Lobbying had nothing to do with it.
> cut freeways across them like big ugly neighborhood-destroying scars.
Not like.
The goal was to destroy neighborhoods--mostly lower socio-economic areas in order to displace the undesirable people away from land that was beginning to appreciate in value.
Freeways are located in very specific spots--close enough to the rich areas to be useful but far enough into the poor areas in order to minimize cost/maximize displacement.
The core of san francisco, probably 30% of the city's 49 sq mile landmass, and where 60%+ of the population lives, was built before cars existed. Most of SF was a walking/horse city, and then a walking/streetcar/cablecar city.
True, alongside downtown Berkeley, Oakland, and Palo Alto (maybe a few others)
Nonetheless, mass transit in SF is still pretty crappy. Muni is notoriously unreliable and slow (it's often faster to jog than take Muni -- to say nothing of biking).
As someone who lived in Palo Alto for almost a year without a car... there is so much to be desired for public transit. Outside of the few blocks near University, it quickly becomes a walking wasteland. My bike, on the other-hand, was a divine gift from the heaven and, when combined with CalTrain, enabled a fairly large world-bubble.
Low Private car ownership isnt a cultural thing in China, it's qutie heavily regulated and coming from above. e.g. getting a license plate takes ages, at certain days only certain license plates can drive.
new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn't that common in China
20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.
The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction & rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.