It’s not so much the transit.....it’s whose using the transit.
meh...
People who can afford it transport themselves at their own convenience. Wealth unprecedented in human history caused the decline of mass transit.
The future may be premium private transport, like the shuttles that take Google, Apple, and Yahoo employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley.
Busses are way more flexible than fixed rail.
Who’s got the time to wait around for a ride anyway?
Public unions killed it.
The "public transit" system dies every time you try to apply it outside of a few large cities. Or Europe which is basically a large city. Even then you have to get "public support" in other words, you have to steal money at gun point from the population who does not use their system to keep it going.
People like to be able to go places on their own schedule rather then having to wait for someone else to take them to where they think they should go.
Even in Chile where you had a nice public transit system people preferred to own cars and move around at their whim.
Perfect case in point:
Over the past hundred years the clearest cause is this: Transit providers in the U.S. have continually cut basic local service in a vain effort to improve their finances.
Over the past hundred years the clearest cause for declining transit ridership has been the migration of people to lower-density areas that simply aren't served well by mass transit. This began in earnest in the 1950s as a result of two landmark pieces of legislation: the G.I. Bill and the Federal Aid Highway Act (also known as the "Interstate Highway Act").
By the 1980s transit systems were under even more pressure because we started to see growth in a commuting pattern that is built entirely around a single-occupancy vehicle: suburb-to-suburb commuting. This is why some of the most God-awful congestion in the U.S. these days isn't in urban centers, but in suburban areas along circumferential highways like the D.C. Beltway.
We invented and now dominate in aviation public transportation because of our vast distances.
Ground transportation is better served by private autos or buses. Rail is generally slower because of stops and train changing.
However our airports are in awful shape, in general embarrassing. But they function.
Public transportation works IF the people who are most likely to use it have a destination to justify using in the first place. That means work or school, mostly. When public transportation seen as a way to spend money with no purpose no private sector wants to get involved in ownerzhip, just construction profits. Maybe the NFL can pay for public transportation to get their fans to taxpayer funded stadiums.
Or not.
SEPTA and DART First State bump for later
I would add some more factors: (1) working parents where there needs to be at least one parent close enough and flexible enough to respond to family emergencies; (2) d-eurbanization where companies are increasingly decentralizing and locating in satellite offices or allowing work at home; (3) internet, where people are no longer having to go to the cities for shopping or entertainment. Maybe it’s time to let some of those old urban areas retire gracefully rather than spending billions of dollars to haul nonexistent people to the cities.
About 50 years ago, when I was in a beginning Engineering Transportation course, the book we had had a chart in it. It showed different forms of public transportation and the population density that was required to support that kind of public transportation.
When my son took the same type of course (with a MUCH more expensive textbook) it did not mention population density. It looks like that standard of review has been abolished. That means that EVERY form of public transportation is destined to lose money nowadays. BTW, even back when I was taking the course, there were VERY few places in the US that had a population density that could support most types of public transportation. Population density has dropped (people per acre) since I went to school.
It is no mystery why transit is weak is the US. If you go to other countries which have well developed public transit systems you will see that a large percentage of their riders are students. But here the government picks the students up and delivers them to and from school. Thus we have taken away a segment of public transits customers. Cities which began to grow AFTER we required school busing tend to have underdeveloped public transit systems. Not enough customers.
100 years ago people could usually ride transit without fear of assault by smelly beggars , robbers, mental defectives, or the outright insane. Also, there usually wasn’t any sheit on the floor, nor used drug needles secreted in the seats.
No mention, anywhere in the thread, of Uber - let alone the self-driving car.
Why should we favor public transit over other forms of transportation?
If you look at the US transit system as a whole, it is staggering in its size, reach, scope and economics. It should be praised and admired.
Fun history, but it VASTLY understates the negative economics.
“Services drive demand”... sure, but those services have to be paid for. And they never are. The author wants the feds to pay for service (operations and maintenance etc). Better uses for that money.
America killed Transit in 1887 when it created the Interstate Commerce Commission.