Why American public transit is so bad | 2020 Election

This is a map of Chicago’s train system. If you look at its design, it’s not hard to figure out what it was built to do. All its different lines intersect here, in Chicago’s downtown, and then fan outward.

This is a system that’s really good at moving people between the suburbs, or the outer rings of the city, and downtown. But that’s not really useful to my friend Nina. I'm a Chicago resident and I live in Avondale.

I drive to work every day. I drive 25 minutes to Elmwood Park, which is a suburb right on the border of the city. Nina actually lives right by a bus stop and a train stop.

But if she commuted that way. . .

I could take the bus down Addison, but the bus route stops at the border of the city. So it would be a pretty long walk. Like a 45-minute walk maybe.

Or maybe I could take the train down to the Loop, and then I would have to get on the Metra, which is the train that goes to the suburbs. Nina said she would commute on public transit if it made sense. But for her, it doesn’t.

Transit systems across the US were built to serve a very specific type of commute: From outside the center of the city, to inside it. But studies show that today, the most common American commute is actually from suburb to suburb; routes that public transit in the US usually doesn’t serve. It’s one reason that the overwhelming majority of Americans get to work by driving alone.

And there are a few reasons that isn’t ideal: First, it means the overwhelming majority of Americans are also required to own a car in order to work. And that’s expensive — the second biggest household expense for Americans. All that driving also means that transportation is the single biggest way Americans emit greenhouse gases.

And because most Americans don’t rely on public transit, making it better is rarely a top political priority, which makes things even harder for the people who do rely on neglected transit systems. So what would it take to shrink this part of the chart -- to get more Americans to use public transit? What would that look like?

And who has the power to make that happen? This is Cincinnati in 1955. It’s what a lot of American cities used to look like.

There were some highways, but most of the city was on a grid, which made it easy to get around either on foot, or on public transit, like streetcars. But around the same time, a huge government infrastructure project changed the US dramatically. New interstate highways were built from coast to coast, many of them running right through the downtowns of many cities.

Today, Cincinnati looks like this. Instead of a grid, there’s a tangle of highways. It makes some neighborhoods almost impossible to get to on foot.

And if you don’t drive, it’s hard to get around the city at all. The same thing happened in countless other cities, too, like Detroit and Kansas City. And, as cities expanded outward along those highways, one kind of American neighborhood flourished: Entirely residential, filled with single-family homes.

And because they were spread out instead of dense, they also changed how Americans got around. Living there required you to travel a lot farther for just about anything. By 2020, a study found that the average workday distance traveled for Americans was 7 miles.

Now, if you're a driver, that doesn't sound long at all. In fact, in your head, you might be thinking, that only takes 10 minutes. Adie Tomer co-authored that study.

It's a biking distance that is both strenuous and potentially unsafe, and for pedestrians it’s a nearly impossible distance to traverse in any kind of reasonable time. By seeing these kind of travel distances, we understand the consequences of what we’ve built: Automobile-oriented neighborhoods. A later approach to neighborhood planning has created places that look more like this: Neighborhoods designed to put you closer to what you need, that center around a transit hub, with buildings that contain not just housing, but office space and businesses too.

This is called transit-oriented development. And the people who live in these places are less likely than the national average to drive, and more likely to walk, bike, or take transit. But developing new neighborhoods like this is an extremely long-term project.

If we're going to address these issues, we have to accept the world that we live in now, and make transit work in that world, rather than dream of a new world. Jonathan English is an urban planner in Toronto. And he thinks getting more Americans to use public transit doesn’t have to be so hard.

In a research project, Jonathan created these maps of American cities and drew lines on them wherever there was a reliable public transit route. Which he defined as this: A bus that comes every 30 minutes, 'till midnight, seven days a week. The absolute bare minimum of a transit route that you can count on.

These were the results in Denver, Portland, Charlotte, and Washington, DC. You can see a familiar design in them: Service oriented around a downtown, but that doesn’t really connect neighborhood to neighborhood. And this was the result in Toronto.

When you go to a Toronto suburb, it's not very unfamiliar to any American. You see houses with big driveways, two-car garages, winding suburban streets… The difference is that the bus goes past those single-family homes every five minutes, and it runs 24 hours a day. And that difference changes everything.

Even car owners in Toronto ride the bus. And Jonathan says the lesson for American cities is obvious. That shows that it is possible, that if we invest in basic operations, and improving basic local service, that the riders will come.

Something that we can do in a matter of weeks. In other words, it’s mostly a matter of whether we choose to fund that. This chart shows how public transit gets funded in the US: Mostly by local and state governments, and by the fares people pay to ride— which makes state and local elections super important for public transit.

Right now, the federal government contributes the smallest part. And even that part is limited in what it can pay for. Very little federal transit funding helps pay for day-to-day operations, even though that’s often where transit systems need the most help.

Instead, most federal money gets directed to what are called "capital investments": flashy new physical infrastructure projects that often get a lot of media attention. So you end up with a billion-dollar rapid transit project, or light rail, or bus rapid transit project, where the vehicles don't actually run all that frequently. Joe Biden’s campaign has a proposal to invest in public transportation, and the Trump administration has shown interest in increasing infrastructure spending.

But where all that money goes is really decided by Congress. And debate over that often splits along partisan lines: with Democrats, who often represent more urban districts, in favor of more transit funding; and Republicans in favor of more funding for highways and roads. “My Democrat colleagues want to put big cities first, and ignore our rural communities.

” In July 2020, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a 1. 5 trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that re-allocated funds from roads to trains and transit. “The first 21st-century transportation bill.

” But to take effect, it would also have to pass the Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans, whose leader, Mitch McConnell, called the bill “nonsense,” “absurd,” and “pure fantasy. ” If the Democrats do in fact take back the Senate, and hold onto the House, irrespective of what happens with the presidency, we can actually expect to see significantly more interest in investment in public transportation, and interestingly, a different approach to that investment, where it may not just be more capital projects, but different kinds of investment. I still really value being on a train line, and I would never live anywhere that wasn't, like, a 15-minute walk from the train, because I think that's so much a part of my experience as a Chicago resident, being able to access it if I need it.

But it's pretty poorly designed. Most Americans live in places that were built for cars. If we want to change that in the long term, we’ll have to build communities that look differently.

Right now, Americans drive because it’s the most convenient option. But that also means that you don’t actually need to transform a whole country to get more people to ride public transit. You just need to make it convenient enough that they want to.