15 Urban Transport
15.1 The Death of American Urban Transit
Zipper
In his new book, historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the collapse of public transportation in US cities — and explains who really deserves the blame.
t’s mind-blowing to consider just how good transit service (public transport) once was (in American cities). You wrote about how 100 years ago, dozens of Chicago’s streetcar lines operated throughout the night, often with 8- to 10-minute headways. What was the rationale for streetcar companies to provide so much service?
Well, the streetcar companies had the customers. They had an effective monopoly on mobility because people either had to use their feet or the streetcar. The motorcars were still for the elite at that time, and there wasn’t a lot of space for them. So the streetcar companies could profitably collect nickels and dimes, running service all through the night at those kinds of levels.
In the United States, we’re used to thinking of transit as requiring ongoing and substantial taxpayer subsidies. But in the book you explained that a century ago, transit was mostly privately provided. And it was quite profitable. How was it such a moneymaker?
Yeah, it was a very profitable business. But the money was never really in the mobility, per se; the money was in the aligned real estate investments. The streetcar lines shortened the time it took for people to travel from city centers or industrial areas and residential areas. By shortening that time, you opened up an empire of land around cities.