Why America Has Terrible Public Transit

It's Thursday, July twent-third. Quick question: how do you feel about public transportation? I take the Caltrain to work whenever I need to go in. It does take 15 minutes longer than if I just drove, but I enjoy it. Whenever I mention that I take public transit, someone responds with some version of "dang that must be annoying." And I get what they mean. The train runs on a schedule that's only sort of reliable, the stations aren't exactly pleasant, and the frequency is low enough that missing a train means waiting thirty minutes to an hour for the next one. But it still works for me, and I keep wondering why the experience feels so much worse here than in every other wealthy country I've visited or heard about. Japan's trains run so precisely that the rail company issued a public apology in 2017 because a train departed 20 seconds early. Twenty seconds. In America, if your train shows up within ten minutes of the scheduled time, you consider that a win.

I've been to London a few times and I used public transport the entire trip, including to and from the airport. You land at Heathrow, hop on the Tube, and you're in the city for a few pounds. In SF I can do the same thing with BART straight to SFO, and in Atlanta I could kind of do it with MARTA. But the frustrating part is always getting to the station in the first place, because there's just not much connecting you from where you live to where the train is. I solve that with a scooter, but most people don't have that option. In European cities, that part is easy too, there's a bus or a tram or a bike lane that gets you to the train, and everything feels like it was designed to work together rather than bolted on as an afterthought. That gap is what got me looking into how we ended up here, and the story goes back further and is more deliberate than I expected. In the early 1900s, more than a thousand American cities and towns had streetcar systems. Electric trolleys ran through Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and dozens of smaller cities. They were the primary way most urban Americans got around, and the infrastructure was extensive. Los Angeles alone had over a thousand miles of streetcar track, which is more track than the city's current Metro system has today.

Between 1936 and 1950, a holding company called National City Lines, funded by General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks, began buying up streetcar systems across the country. They acquired transit operations in roughly 45 cities, and in most of those cities, they converted the streetcar lines to bus routes served by GM-manufactured buses, running on Standard Oil fuel, with Firestone tires. The streetcar tracks were ripped out. The overhead wires came down. And in many cities, the bus service that replaced the streetcars was then allowed to decline in quality and frequency, which pushed more people toward buying cars.

In 1947, the companies were indicted under the Sherman Antitrust Act on charges of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and supplies to the transit companies they had acquired. They were convicted in 1949. The fine was $5,000. Five thousand dollars for dismantling the transit infrastructure of dozens of American cities. To put that in perspective, a single GM bus at the time cost more than the fine.

Historians debate how much blame to assign the conspiracy versus broader trends. Car ownership was rising everywhere in America during this period, including in cities where National City Lines never operated. Streetcar companies were already struggling financially because they were privately owned businesses locked into fixed fare rates that couldn't keep up with rising operating costs. Some researchers argue that National City Lines was exploiting a trend that was already underway rather than creating one. That's probably partly true, but the effect is the same regardless of the intent: by 1970, the vast majority of American cities that once had streetcar systems no longer did, and the country had committed almost entirely to highways and private automobiles as the primary mode of transportation. While America was tearing out streetcar tracks and building highways, the rest of the developed world was doing the opposite.

Japan invested heavily in rail after World War II and built the Shinkansen (shin-KAN-sen), the first high-speed rail system in the world, which launched in 1964 connecting Tokyo and Osaka at speeds up to 130 miles per hour. Today the system covers most of the country and runs with a punctuality rate that borders on absurd: the average delay across all Shinkansen lines is measured in seconds, not minutes. Japanese employers typically reimburse their employees' commuting costs on public transit, which means taking the train is not just convenient but financially incentivized, while car ownership in urban Japan is deliberately expensive through mandatory safety inspections, high fuel taxes, and parking costs that can exceed rent in some neighborhoods.

Europe took a similar path. France built the TGV (train à grande vitesse, which translates to "high-speed train") starting in the 1980s, connecting Paris to major cities at speeds over 180 miles per hour. Germany's Deutsche Bahn (DOY-chuh BAHN) rail network covers the entire country. China has built the largest high-speed rail network in the world from scratch in about twenty years, with over 25,000 miles of track carrying passengers at speeds up to 220 miles per hour.

Meanwhile, the US has Amtrak, which operates on tracks it mostly doesn't own, frequently runs behind schedule because freight trains get priority on shared tracks, and covers the distance from New York to Chicago in about 19 hours. The same distance on a Chinese high-speed train would take roughly five. The average American household spends over $12,000 per year on car ownership, and collectively Americans spend roughly $3.5 trillion annually on their 285 million registered vehicles. The infrastructure was built for cars, the culture was built around cars, and now the cost of maintaining that system is enormous while the alternative barely exists. The reason American public transit stays underfunded isn't just historical momentum from the streetcar era, it's a self-reinforcing cycle that's really hard to break.

Federal transportation funding in the US comes primarily from the gas tax. When people drive more, gas tax revenue goes up, and that money flows almost entirely to highway construction and maintenance. When fewer people use public transit, ridership numbers drop, which gives politicians less justification to fund transit improvements, which makes the service worse, which pushes more people to drive, which generates more gas tax revenue for highways. The cycle feeds itself: bad transit creates more drivers, more drivers fund more highways, more highways reduce the case for transit investment.

Even Australia, which has a similar geography and a car-oriented culture, spends significantly more per capita on public transit than the US. Australia's most remote territory spends more on transit per person per year than any American state. The US has a $140 billion backlog of deferred maintenance on its existing transit infrastructure, meaning the systems we do have are falling apart because they can't get the funding to maintain what already exists, let alone build anything new.

The housing episode we did a few weeks ago connects directly to this: single-family zoning and low-density suburban sprawl made transit economically unviable in most American cities because the population density isn't high enough to support frequent service. You need a certain number of people per square mile to make a train line or bus route financially sustainable, and American suburbs were designed at densities that make transit almost impossible to operate efficiently. The same zoning decisions that created the housing shortage also created the transit desert, and both trace back to a mid-twentieth-century vision of American life built entirely around the automobile.

I take Caltrain every day and it works for me, but I also live close enough to a station to make it practical, and I have a scooter that covers the last mile. Most Americans don't have either of those things, and the system isn't designed to give them a viable alternative to driving. The country that once had streetcar systems in over a thousand cities now has a transit infrastructure that ranks below most of the developed world, and the path from there to here wasn't accidental. It was built, one highway at a time, and rebuilding it in the other direction is going to take a lot longer than tearing it down did. The thing I keep coming back to is how circular the problem is. Bad transit pushes people into cars, car-dependent infrastructure generates funding for more highways, and the case for investing in transit gets weaker every year even though the need for it gets stronger. A thousand American cities used to have streetcar systems, and a consortium of car and oil companies bought them up and ripped them out for a $5,000 fine. Whether they killed the streetcar or just buried the body, the result is the same: a country where driving isn't really a choice, it's the only option, and the cost of maintaining that system is $3.5 trillion a year spread across 285 million vehicles. I take Caltrain every morning and it works for me, but I know I'm the exception, and the twenty seconds that Japanese rail companies apologize for would be a miracle on most American transit systems.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.