Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis

11. Motorization and Sustainability:History and Prospect

ELEVEN Motorization and Sustainability: History and Prospect This book began with the observation that the United States relies on cars and trucks for mass transportation. In the pages that followed, we have shown how and why the United States became the world’s most pervasively motorized nation and how and why mass transit has been marginalized in U.S. metropolitan areas. Many planners and urbanists believe that the marginalization of mass transit was primarily attributable to the interstate highway program, metropolitan freeway development, and the continuing suburban population growth that accompanied it. A different picture emerges from tracing transit’s history from the late nineteenth century to the present. This longer history situates the onset of transit’s financial difficulties at the beginning of the twentieth century when the U.S. economy evolved from a deflationary bias to an inflationary bias. Franchise agreements that mandated a fixed fare combined with inflation to deprive street railways of the profitability they needed to attract continuing private investment . After 1907, the history of street railways is a history of gradual financial attrition and corresponding difficulty in securing the capital necessary for modernization , service extension, or grade separation. During World War I, inflation and federally mandated wage increases for transit workers further diminished the transit industry’s earnings, destroying the borrowing power that streetcar 222 ⴗ EVOLVING CHALLENGES IN AN EVOLVED ENVIRONMENT companies would have needed to finance postwar reinvestment and modernization . Street railways never recovered, and of the nation’s primary transit markets, only New York City made any substantial further investment in rapid transit during the 1920s. The same era produced the first hinge event in the history of global motorization : Henry Ford’s pathbreaking 1908 experiment with assembly-line production of the Model T. Thereafter, the trajectory of U.S. motorization was steadily upward and gross investment in transit was steadily downward. Net disinvestment became the transit industry’s nationwide norm in 1916 and persisted until the 1960s when Congress finally authorized the federal funding necessary for public acquisition of public transportation and subsequent reinvestment and ridership recovery. Given this chronology, the decline of transit and its ridership cannot be attributed to the interstate or unbalanced public policy. U.S. transit use had already declined from its peacetime peak of 147 rides per capita in 1926 to 70 rides per capita in 1955. Much of the intervening decline was attributable to increasing automobile ownership. Mass motorization, the interstate, and suburbanization have stymied transit ’s efforts to rebuild market share under public ownership. Clearly, the interstate enhanced the value of automobile ownership and contributed to the accessibility of outlying acreage susceptible to development as affordable housing for would-be homeowners. It also contributed to the increase in vehicle miles of travel in U.S. metropolitan areas and to the reconceptualization of suburban street layouts. The tiered hierarchy of roads that resulted was designed to shelter the residential neighborhoods of suburban communities from the intrusion of fast-moving traffic. The unintended side effect was to make walking and transit use more difficult. This did not trigger arterial transit’s competitive decline, but it has made the eventual expansion of transit service under public ownership more costly and much less productive than planners anticipated. During the interstate era, transit rides per capita of the national population slipped from 70 in the year 1955 to 33 in the year 2000. Thus freeway development and suburbanization clearly contributed to the continuing marginalization of mass transit. But a substantial portion of transit’s decline was also attributable to the loss of smokestack industries in the industrial cities of the northeastern and north central states and the consequent drop in central city population and employment in major transit markets. During this same period, national leadership in population and employment growth shifted from frostbelt cities to the suburbs and the sunbelt where urban densities and transit use rates are much lower. Public ownership and public subsidy have stabilized aggregate transit ridership in the range of 33–35 rides per capita, but have not prevented continuing decline in transit’s commute share. MOTORIZATION AND SUSTAINABILITY ⴗ 223 Public ownership, subsidized operation, the expansion of suburban service, and stable fares have enabled transit to attract significant numbers of new riders, especially in the suburbs and the sunbelt and during off-peak hours. Transit has continued to experience losses in both commuter...