“North America really is unique in the world in the lack of good public transit,” the author Jake Berman told me while discussing his new book, The Lost Subways of North America. The oversize, map-laden volume is a slickly designed deep dive into the mass transit stories of 23 major cities in the US and Canada. Packed with fascinating histories and tons of absorbing information – ever wonder why elevated trains went out of style, or why monorails just don’t work? – the book is a lively and compelling examination of how mass transit has succeeded and failed across the continent.
“European cities never decided to build the kind of copy-and-paste suburbs that we built in North America,” said Berman, explaining why transit has fared so much better across the Atlantic. “The other part of that is, American cities do not make particularly good use of the land near their transit systems. For instance, many stops on [the Bay Area’s Bay Area Rapid Transit] Bart is surrounded mostly by strip malls, or single-family homes or gigantic parking lots.”
While talking with Berman, the misuse of land around transit hubs was a recurrent topic, a common pitfall that undermined the design of subways, light rail and streetcars in many major cities. In one of multiple examples, Berman shared that Dallas’s many miles of light rail doesn’t necessary equal a valuable transit system. “It’s crazy to think that Dallas has about as many miles of rail as Barcelona,” he told me. “The difference is, there’s not a whole lot near Dallas’s rail stations, whereas in Barcelona there’s apartments, there’s stores, there’s businesses, there’s churches – basically everything that you need for daily life.”
Surprising winners emerged from Berman’s research for Lost Subways of North America. While Dallas may conform to stereotypes about gas-guzzling Texans and their lack of good mass transit, the neighboring city of Houston proved to be one of the locations that is doing transit right. As Berman explains, Houston’s light rail within the city’s core took advantage of reforms in laws reducing mandatory parking lots and increasing housing density – the result is that transit in the city’s core functions far better than similar light rail in places like Dallas and Los Angeles, which don’t give access to major infrastructure and employment hubs, and which don’t supply adequate housing.
In addition to commenting on contemporary situations, Berman’s book is also a rewarding look into the history that informs our contemporary transit mess. For instance, he does an apt job of retelling the oft-told defeat of Los Angeles’s streetcar system by freeway – including a strange moment in which an LA monorail almost took hold. This retelling makes for the perfect prologue to Berman’s discussion of LA’s decades-long pursuit of a viable light rail system, which continues to this day. The idea of such a venture took hold because of a rivalry with San Francisco’s Bart in the 1960s. “It really is an interesting thing seeing how municipal rivalries played out in the transit space,” he said. “LA put a subway system on the ballot in 68 because the Bay Area had approved Bart six years prior.”
LA’s light rail would remain a dream for decades, but eventually that city did come to develop about 110 miles of track (favorably comparing to the Bart’s current 131 miles). Unfortunately, Berman laments that all those Southland metro miles are for naught, as the city still conceives of itself as “a horizontal city, not a vertical one”. With the failure of LA to pursue high-rise housing developments around metro hubs, Berman argues the city’s mass transit system will remain unsuccessful.
While LA is widely talked about as a mass transit hard case, lesser known is Berman’s treatment of Rochester, New York, at 211,000 inhabitants the “smallest city to ever build a subway” and “the only city in the world to build and operate a full-blown subway system, then abandon it entirely”. Completed in 1927, the problem with Rochester’s subway was that, in the words of a city newspaper, “it starts nowhere and goes nowhere”. After some successful years, the system fell into insolvency after the second world war, eventually entering a ridership death spiral that saw it shut down in 1956, making way for freeways.
Whether it’s Rochester or Los Angeles, Berman argues that making a successful mass transit system isn’t overly complicated, as most successful systems are so for the same reasons. “There’s that line from Anna Karenina,” he said, “all happy families are alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And the adage definitely applies to transit. There are a whole lot of things that cities with good transit systems do correctly, and most of those things need to come into place for the system to work.” That would include building apartments and businesses around stations, as well as other kinds of amenities that people would be willing to ride transit to reach. “There’s been a sort of forgetting that transit doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he said.
If there are common factors in mass transit success, there is also at least one common factor in mass transit fails – bureaucracy, which often prevents the creation of transit routes, as well as the creation of the necessary amenities to make said routes thrive. Berman writes that in San Francisco, along the major transit corridor Geary Street, “it took from 2000 to 2011 to replace the bankrupt Coronet Theater with rent-controlled senior apartments … All the while, San Francisco keeps adding more jobs.” Berman argues that the continued creation of jobs throughout the Bay Area – without a similar rise in housing stock – is one of the key drivers of the homelessness crisis.
He contrasts the current failure to create housing in a timely manner to the can-do attitude that originally made San Francisco’s Muni bus system develop many key routes quickly and efficiently. “A lot of what I talk about in the book is related to very deep questions about transit planning and why cities can’t build infrastructure quickly,” Berman said. “The Geary Boulevard subway in San Francisco has been planned since the 1930s. It’s very hard to get things done these days like they could in the old days. When Muni built the Geary Boulevard streetcar in 1912, it took six months to do it. There is a lot to be talked about regarding making the perfect the enemy of the good.”
Although Berman sees much to critique in contemporary transit, he remains hopeful that a book demonstrating everything that was once done right – and those things that still are being done correctly – might inspire a transit turnaround. One of the reasons he wrote Lost Subways of North America is to share his belief that it’s not too late for cities across this continent to get with the program. “I would hope that people have a certain sense of optimism that we were able to do this once and we can do it again. Back in the day it was normal for people to build apartment buildings near train stations. We can do this. Providing perspective of the past is what I hope to give to the reader.”
The Lost Subways of North America is out now
