Why Is Mass Transit So Bad in America?

Mass transit networks are fast, ubiquitous, and cheap in many cities in places like Asia and Europe. Trains, buses, subway lines, streetcars…you name it, plow through the streets of busy cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, and Paris. But in the U.S., with the exception of a few cities like New York and Washington D.C., mass transit sucks. It’s expensive, infrequent, and coverage is extremely limited. Just why is mass transit so bad in America? Well, it has to do with history, culture, and city planning.

A major point to keep in mind is that many large cities in America, like Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle are quite young by world standards. For example, Los Angeles only reached a population of 100,000 in 1900, while Houston only reached that by about 1915. In fact, the first time cities like Houston had more than one million people recorded in a census was 1970! This means when most of these cities experienced their periods of rapid growth, it was already very late on in the 20th century, and by then, automobiles were already very common. It also meant that it was easy for people to live in the suburbs because they could just drive.

Cities like London that had been established for over a thousand years didn’t have this problem, because they were already well-built by the time cars were invented. This meant that these cities are developed around a compact urban core since people walked everywhere before cars were invented, so it would have been very inconvenient to live in a suburb.

It also explains why New York has such a great mass transit network: it was very well-built before automobiles became popular. The bulk of New York City’s subway system was built before the 1930s.

Arguably, the main reason why American cities lack transit is due to urban sprawl and zoning regulations. In the U.S., zoning laws are extremely strict. This means land use for commercial and residential purposes are extremely segregated from one another and are generally not allowed to mix. Therefore, people have to travel a longer distance to go to the grocery store, for example, since by law, there can’t be any in the residential areas.

Take a look at the following picture of one of Houston’s suburbs, Sugar Land, as an example.

As can be very clearly seen, a large swath of land on the left and bottom right side of the picture is zoned off for single-family housing, while the area near the freeway is zoned off for commercial activity like malls, stores, and hospitals. Compare this to Brooklyn in New York, a city with great mass transit links, for instance, and the differences are stark.

In Brooklyn, zoning laws are significantly less strict, partly because New York is quite an old city and was built before the era of strict zoning laws. This allowed businesses to open in the same place as residences, reducing the need for long trips to places like the grocery store.

Therefore, due to zoning laws in many “new” American cities, they are much less walkable than most European or Asian counterparts, greatly heightening the need for a car.

Now that we’ve seen why American cities tend to favor people driving, we need to discuss why it’s hard to move back into the mass transit model. For a start, it would be hugely expensive to build lots of new streetcar lines serving low-density, single-family housing suburbs. It would also be inefficient, as few people would use them. Many cities like Dallas and Los Angeles have started to build streetcar lines and expand bus lines in downtown areas, but that doesn’t help increase ridership. Because most people in these cities live in the suburbs, these downtown transit options won’t be very useful to them, explaining why so many U.S. transit networks are facing low ridership. In Denver, for example, due to transit not going to place people actually need to go, many people are giving up on transit and just opting to drive instead.

Also, having a transit network focused on suburb to downtown work commutes isn’t very sustainable, as people will just use it to go to work and nothing else. To have a transit network that really works, you need it to go everywhere where anyone might want to go, including business areas, parks, sports areas, other residences, and more. Just as an example, take a look at the picture below.

If I lived at point A, and I wanted to visit my friend who lived at point B, do you really think that I would crowd onto a train line into town, then switch onto another line to my friend’s house? No! I would just take the direct freeway and drive instead. This is really one of the main problems with many city’s transit networks: it isn’t multi-purposed enough.

And once people have gotten accustomed to commuting in their cars, it’s almost impossible to go back. Why would anyone give up driving in their cozy, private cars to go take noisy, infrequent, and inconvenient public transportation? It would be exceedingly difficult to convince people that taking mass transit would be more convenient for them. Besides, driving a car is just so “American.” America has a very individualistic culture, and driving a car is the perfect thing for that: your own car, which can be driven wherever you want, whenever you want.

A lack of ridership just creates a toxic cycle: because no one rides it, no government wants to invest more money to make it better, and as a result fewer people ride it. To fix transit, we need to be able to connect every part of the city well, and somehow convince the masses to ditch their cars.