Here in the wilds of South Africa where we wear grass skirts, live in mud huts and spend our days avoiding being eaten by lions, we have a public transport system at least a hundred times more effective in terms of cost and capacity than the billion dollar boondoggles of the West. It is called the minibus taxi. Privately owned, the taxi requires zero zilch nothing nada nil taxpayer investment and daily it moves millions of people on hundreds of thousands of infinitely flexible routes. Its only drawback, it offers limited opportunity for politicians and their cronies to become obscenely rich.
In certain highly dense urban areas trains can make a lot of sense even if, yes, a lot of connected interests stand to profit enormously from construction and graft. In New York City for instance the bus system is very slow in traffic and on its own would be utterly inadequate, and that may well be true for other very large cities, especially those primarily built before cars became standard. But in most places, including lower-slung urban areas that aren't packed with skyscrapers, the flexibility and lower costs of busses and vans are probably the better option.
US examples are often particularly flagrant, of course, but city public transport in all rich countries are commercially unsustainable without subsidies.
In fact the irony is that it is in poor countries, where people have to struggle to make something akin to decent living and watch every penny, that you see that kind of bottom up entrepreneurship fuelling a sustainable system without any subsidies and letting prices and competition coordinate everything.
And it is also in places like India, even when much poorer than today, that whole subway systems got build in a few years once size, crowding, demand and urgency made the informal system insufficient at scale.
US mid size cities, however, do not even have the density and traffic patterns to make rail transit viable in the first place nor the congestion levels to mitigate. But they have money to throw at the trendy and politically attractive. The political successors can take care of the less glamorous issue of filling up empty light rail cars once they are out of office.
Public transit is being hurt most by politicians implementing garbage instead of professionals with knowledge and understanding what needs to be done and how it would work. Your example of the St Louis fiasco illustrates this picture. The low ridership is in part due to the crime and the crime is high because the ridership. Professionals would understand that. Politicians don’t as they continue to insist there is no crime problem. Chicago is the poster child of this.
Mix all of this with your statement of the freedom of being in the car, which I totally agree with. It’s a recipe for chaos. However, I don’t subscribe to the congestion taxing though…it doesn’t help anyone or anything, except probably a few corrupted lawmakers.
Many of the professionals don't have so great a track record a lot of the time, either. A transactional politician might see it to their advantage to take public opinion into account, whereas the professional field of building public transit is sort of an unseemly stew of contractors' schemes and big labor contracts and climate advocates and technocrats and other local interests with mixed motivations. The St. Louis MetroLink light rail network I wouldn't call a fiasco like the Loop Trolley, but it's underperformed over the years and the plans to expand it further don't seem very practical or suited to the region.
I did not expect to be as persuaded about congestion pricing when I started reading the Gelinas book as I eventually was. Yes, it's a regressive tax that will quickly be gobbled up by the corrupt MTA without making much difference to service. However, reforms that have been implemented over the past few decades narrowing certain roads, building out more green and pedestrian space, etc. has lowered traffic fatalities significantly and made it faster for emergency vehicles to get around and so forth. I see why drivers in Jersey and Long Island would object but a lower and lower proportion of New York City residents have cars and there's just so little space in core Manhattan. There are very, very few city centers in the U.S. where I'd say congestion pricing might make sense, though.
The anti-car ideology is often a childless one as well. If you're living in a high-density neighborhood in a city, and you only have your own transportation needs to take into consideration, you'll look at maters differently than someone who has kids and perhaps older relatives to transport. The class-dclass-divide enters in multiple ways. One being the fact driving is the top job for working-class men. Love the package arriving on time, but less love for the driver. The other being that many working-class jobs require long commutes. You may not be able to afford to live anywhere near your job. If someone lives in north St. Louis City and works in Chesterfield that's a twenty minute drive or a two-hour bus ride? Good like selling the bus ride as a better option.
That's an excellent point! I tend to think that more of the YIMBY movement is pushed by developers than advocates like to admit, but to the extent that it's organic the most influential voices tend to be childless twenty- and thirty-somethings living in very dense and affluent areas. They live in an echo chamber and don't know what they don't know, such as a working mom trying to navigate getting children to different schools and appointments and sports practices. People's transit needs are too diverse for any one-size-fits-all "solution."
I enjoyed this essay, especially the reflections on how some of our city's "grand" planners were so terribly wrong. I hope we are able to institute congestion pricing.
My sense is that Gov. Hochul was probably privy to some discouraging internal polling about the election, and figured populist outrage about congestion pricing could potentially lose Democrats some offices upstate and in New Jersey. She might have made the right tactical decision politically, but policy-wise it's regrettable.
Where I come from there are no tolls on any highways or bridges, that's what feels normal to me, and being that we're talking about the MTA surely a bunch of the new revenues would/will be wasted. I feel for the families in suburban Jersey for whom taking in dinner and a show would/will become even more exorbitant. But despite the downsides and my midwestern inclinations Gelinas is very persuasive that congestion pricing (maybe with a sexier name connoting benefits rather than costs) is the right way to go.
One of the things that has often been noted about BART (the Bay Areas limited rail system) is that it crippled Oakland in order to make SF grander, as it easily stripped the middle classes of that city for higher paying jobs in Frisco.* Perhaps we can see much the same in areas nearby NYC.
Congestion pricing, whether in NYC or London, is a poor idea, as it punishes the poor coming in from the outer areas in order to provide for the rich living on Manhattan, where, unlike the rest of the city, the subway actually works as a daily option. In the other four areas, as you know it only feeds into Manhattan, and you cannot easily get around. Also, as you state, many urban planners (such as my son) get things terrible wrong. Bike lanes being one of them, as they are much more dangerous than riding on the street as a moving vehicle. Might congestion pricing be another path to failure? If you aren't driving in and out of the city itself, indeed do not even own one of the machines, why worry about the amount of cars on the road?
Last time I was there (my son lives in Brooklyn) I had a car and found it easy to drive around and visit many of the off-the-beaten-track areas of NYC, and in doing so had a good time. Also, as a handicapped person, mass transit is fairly useless. No, the best way to deal with congestion would be to make parking more expensive.
*my roots in that city go back to the 1850's and I will call it what ever I darn well feel like, current residents be damned.
Here in the wilds of South Africa where we wear grass skirts, live in mud huts and spend our days avoiding being eaten by lions, we have a public transport system at least a hundred times more effective in terms of cost and capacity than the billion dollar boondoggles of the West. It is called the minibus taxi. Privately owned, the taxi requires zero zilch nothing nada nil taxpayer investment and daily it moves millions of people on hundreds of thousands of infinitely flexible routes. Its only drawback, it offers limited opportunity for politicians and their cronies to become obscenely rich.
In certain highly dense urban areas trains can make a lot of sense even if, yes, a lot of connected interests stand to profit enormously from construction and graft. In New York City for instance the bus system is very slow in traffic and on its own would be utterly inadequate, and that may well be true for other very large cities, especially those primarily built before cars became standard. But in most places, including lower-slung urban areas that aren't packed with skyscrapers, the flexibility and lower costs of busses and vans are probably the better option.
US examples are often particularly flagrant, of course, but city public transport in all rich countries are commercially unsustainable without subsidies.
In fact the irony is that it is in poor countries, where people have to struggle to make something akin to decent living and watch every penny, that you see that kind of bottom up entrepreneurship fuelling a sustainable system without any subsidies and letting prices and competition coordinate everything.
And it is also in places like India, even when much poorer than today, that whole subway systems got build in a few years once size, crowding, demand and urgency made the informal system insufficient at scale.
US mid size cities, however, do not even have the density and traffic patterns to make rail transit viable in the first place nor the congestion levels to mitigate. But they have money to throw at the trendy and politically attractive. The political successors can take care of the less glamorous issue of filling up empty light rail cars once they are out of office.
"...the trendy and politically attractive." Yes!
Public transit is being hurt most by politicians implementing garbage instead of professionals with knowledge and understanding what needs to be done and how it would work. Your example of the St Louis fiasco illustrates this picture. The low ridership is in part due to the crime and the crime is high because the ridership. Professionals would understand that. Politicians don’t as they continue to insist there is no crime problem. Chicago is the poster child of this.
Mix all of this with your statement of the freedom of being in the car, which I totally agree with. It’s a recipe for chaos. However, I don’t subscribe to the congestion taxing though…it doesn’t help anyone or anything, except probably a few corrupted lawmakers.
Many of the professionals don't have so great a track record a lot of the time, either. A transactional politician might see it to their advantage to take public opinion into account, whereas the professional field of building public transit is sort of an unseemly stew of contractors' schemes and big labor contracts and climate advocates and technocrats and other local interests with mixed motivations. The St. Louis MetroLink light rail network I wouldn't call a fiasco like the Loop Trolley, but it's underperformed over the years and the plans to expand it further don't seem very practical or suited to the region.
I did not expect to be as persuaded about congestion pricing when I started reading the Gelinas book as I eventually was. Yes, it's a regressive tax that will quickly be gobbled up by the corrupt MTA without making much difference to service. However, reforms that have been implemented over the past few decades narrowing certain roads, building out more green and pedestrian space, etc. has lowered traffic fatalities significantly and made it faster for emergency vehicles to get around and so forth. I see why drivers in Jersey and Long Island would object but a lower and lower proportion of New York City residents have cars and there's just so little space in core Manhattan. There are very, very few city centers in the U.S. where I'd say congestion pricing might make sense, though.
The anti-car ideology is often a childless one as well. If you're living in a high-density neighborhood in a city, and you only have your own transportation needs to take into consideration, you'll look at maters differently than someone who has kids and perhaps older relatives to transport. The class-dclass-divide enters in multiple ways. One being the fact driving is the top job for working-class men. Love the package arriving on time, but less love for the driver. The other being that many working-class jobs require long commutes. You may not be able to afford to live anywhere near your job. If someone lives in north St. Louis City and works in Chesterfield that's a twenty minute drive or a two-hour bus ride? Good like selling the bus ride as a better option.
That's an excellent point! I tend to think that more of the YIMBY movement is pushed by developers than advocates like to admit, but to the extent that it's organic the most influential voices tend to be childless twenty- and thirty-somethings living in very dense and affluent areas. They live in an echo chamber and don't know what they don't know, such as a working mom trying to navigate getting children to different schools and appointments and sports practices. People's transit needs are too diverse for any one-size-fits-all "solution."
Very nice review! Just nuanced enough, and a good feel for the book, and why one might outta read it. Well done.
Thank you! The book really is worth reading.
I enjoyed this essay, especially the reflections on how some of our city's "grand" planners were so terribly wrong. I hope we are able to institute congestion pricing.
My sense is that Gov. Hochul was probably privy to some discouraging internal polling about the election, and figured populist outrage about congestion pricing could potentially lose Democrats some offices upstate and in New Jersey. She might have made the right tactical decision politically, but policy-wise it's regrettable.
Where I come from there are no tolls on any highways or bridges, that's what feels normal to me, and being that we're talking about the MTA surely a bunch of the new revenues would/will be wasted. I feel for the families in suburban Jersey for whom taking in dinner and a show would/will become even more exorbitant. But despite the downsides and my midwestern inclinations Gelinas is very persuasive that congestion pricing (maybe with a sexier name connoting benefits rather than costs) is the right way to go.
I did not think about that tactical angle. Thanks for that insight.
One of the things that has often been noted about BART (the Bay Areas limited rail system) is that it crippled Oakland in order to make SF grander, as it easily stripped the middle classes of that city for higher paying jobs in Frisco.* Perhaps we can see much the same in areas nearby NYC.
Congestion pricing, whether in NYC or London, is a poor idea, as it punishes the poor coming in from the outer areas in order to provide for the rich living on Manhattan, where, unlike the rest of the city, the subway actually works as a daily option. In the other four areas, as you know it only feeds into Manhattan, and you cannot easily get around. Also, as you state, many urban planners (such as my son) get things terrible wrong. Bike lanes being one of them, as they are much more dangerous than riding on the street as a moving vehicle. Might congestion pricing be another path to failure? If you aren't driving in and out of the city itself, indeed do not even own one of the machines, why worry about the amount of cars on the road?
Last time I was there (my son lives in Brooklyn) I had a car and found it easy to drive around and visit many of the off-the-beaten-track areas of NYC, and in doing so had a good time. Also, as a handicapped person, mass transit is fairly useless. No, the best way to deal with congestion would be to make parking more expensive.
*my roots in that city go back to the 1850's and I will call it what ever I darn well feel like, current residents be damned.