The current configuration of cars and mass transit is half of the story. The other half is the evolution of living spaces in the U.S. Each side creates and reinforces the other. The balance we have now is a logical necessity of billions of small decisions made over the last century.
Suburbanization started more than a century ago, but the major trends that affect us today can be said to start after WWII. Because of the pent up demand from the Depression and the War the country immediately needed some 15,000,000 new houses. Cities were overcrowded and run down, with no new buildings and little maintenance for two decades. Suburban land was open, available, and cheap. Instead of the feared post-war recession and unemployment, jobs boomed and people could afford cars and houses. They rushed out of the cities.
We can argue what would have happened if mass transit had followed and suburbs got created along railway lines as had happened pre-war. But no money went into mass transit and money flowed into building highways. At first the highways were designed to replicate commuter routes into the cities. But if the logic was against building houses in the cities, a similar logic said that factories, stores, warehouses, distribution centers and other job sites that needed lots of land would make more sense being built in the same empty, cheap land in the suburbs.
And that same logic doomed mass transit. Mass by definition can only work when large numbers have need to go to particular areas. Central cities were mass. Suburbs were not. They were lattices of points that individually did not gather sufficient people to make a mass transit stop economically worthwhile. Worse, their number and location kept changing. Central city was always there. Every year, new suburban sites opened over a larger physical area. This increased the potential costs of any mass transit system exponentially.
Cars had none of these drawbacks. They were perfect for going place to place with single occupants. So more people bought cars and went to more locations that existed because they were easy to get to by car. And each year mass transit became more expensive and more inconvenient.
This is the current situation, except worse, because it exists everywhere in the country, not just as an extension of older cities that already had a large central core. We’ve had 60 years in which the logic of every daily move by the vast majority of Americans is dictated by where a car can go.
The real question is: have we reached a point at which that must change? Nobody has a convincing answer to this. We have certainly not reached a point where most people putting down their money for sites to live and modes of transportation are convinced a change must take place.
Only one thing historically has changed thinking. Gas prices. The OPEC crisis of the 70s did change thinking. Higher gas prices brought legislation to mandate higher fleet gas mileage. But that meant people could maintain their current life logic, just with better cars.
The four dollar gas bump in 2008 made a similar but much shorter bump.
So why mass transit? What is the logic of it? There is some logic for connecting cities by train rather than plane, but only within about a 400 mile trip. Unfortunately, most of these corridors are in the most expensive places to build.
There is very little logic for extending fixed-route mass transit almost anywhere inside sprawling metro areas. A few corridors, maybe.
There is some logic for increasing bus routes but the sprawl of suburban areas makes these economically infeasible almost everywhere unless cars are somehow eliminated as competitors.
There is great logic in making cars cheaper to operate. This is offset by the fact that new technologies, like hybrids or electrics, cost incrementally more than the savings in gas and will probably stay that way for years, maybe decades. The other alternative is a gas tax but that too makes operating a car more expensive.
What about changing the infrastructure? Get people back into cities. Create walkable suburbs. Place schools and stores and other daily destinations together to eliminate the need for mileage. Why would this happen without overwhelming economic incentive? I’ve read articles for decades crowing about enclaves of 10,000 new residents in cities, while 1,000,000 more people enter suburbs unheralded.
We live in a car culture. More cars, at least more total vehicles, than people. Cars work for the individual so incredibly well that they are a necessity for almost everyone outside of a few atypical locations. Mass transit can replace only a tiny fraction of cars but at an enormous cost. Even for the sake of the planet most people won’t do that.
A much larger percentage of people could replace gas cars with better environmental alternatives. People drive less than 50 miles on most trips, or whatever the latest guess is. At best, however, people with two or more cars will replace one of them with an alternative. And they will need economic incentives to do so. That pushes the change-over point out several decades beyond where forecasts about other conditions are in any way meaningful.
I’m not suggesting doing nothing. I’m saying that most of the plans being offered won’t work. In many ways the fact that everything is up for grabs is a good thing. Better to let many experiments play out to see which one wins than to pick something guaranteed to be wrong and mandate it. My hunch is that the winner will be something not being talking much about right now, because all the current plans are losers. That’s not as much fun as advocating your pet project, I know. History is like that.