Why US public transportation is so bad -- and why Americans don't care
How American mass transit measures up against the rest of the world’s.
By Aditi Shrikantaditi.shrikant@voxmedia.com Sep 26, 2018, 6:30am EDT
The US has bad public transit, but you probably already know that. While some cities do have impressive webs of efficient rail, for the most part, we are a car-dependent society because Americans largely don’t understand how transit should work and see no need to prioritize it.
So what it would take to bring US transit up to par? To answer that question, you have understand the differences between US transit systems and those in the rest of the world.
The state of American public transportation
According to a recent study, New York is the only US city with a significant rail network where ridership has increased since 2012 — in several other US cities included in the survey, ridership fell. Already, North America carries the fewest rail passengers per year of any world region, only accounting for 3.7 billion of the 53 billion passengers worldwide. Ridership in Asia increased by 9 billion to 26 billion between 2012 and 2017; Europe now accounts for 10 billion riders, and Latin America 6 billion.
While there are major American cities with popular public transit systems, they’re often northern and coastal, like Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle. The only Southern city to rank within the top 25 cities with good transit systems is Houston, Texas, even though many large Southern cities like Dallas and Atlanta have traffic congestion problems.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/26/17903146/mass-transit-public-transit-rail-subway-bus-car
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