Transit doesn’t require years more testing, thousands of engineers, and tens of billions of dollars more in investments to perfect; we know that buses, trains, and streetcars work, as they have for over a century.
We once dreamed of a world without cars. Early science fiction is littered with futuristic promises of public transportation. When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells, published in 1899, featured rapidly moving sidewalks with seats, kiosks, and “an innumerable and wonderfully diversified multitude of people.” Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 “The Worlds of If” speculated about a crowded but friendly “trans-oceanic rocket.” In Ray Bradbury’s 1950s classic Fahrenheit 451, protagonist Guy Montag rode a “silent air-propelled train [that] slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth and let him out … onto the cream tiled escalator rising to the suburb.”1
As the twentieth century wore on, depictions of transportation veered toward the privatized, with the flying cars, jetpacks, and speeders in The Jetsons and Star Wars capturing the public imagination. Yet the curious presence of public transit lingered, mostly as convenient prop: the backdrop of action movies like Speed and Mission: Impossible, or a locale for somewhat inconvenient or bizarre meetings, meditations, or getaways. Stranger Than Fiction’s Harold Crick reads a fateful manuscript on the night bus until it pulls into the depot. Clementine and Joel have an awkwardly adorable meeting on the Long Island Rail Road in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Peter Parker rescues New York subway riders in Spider-Man 2. In those films, public transit is an almost unfortunate reality of society, with participants finding joy amid the grime and crowdedness.
But in 2018, a startlingly sympathetic Hollywood depiction of public transportation came in the form of a Marvel blockbuster, Black Panther. Celebrated for many reasons—it was the first top-tier superhero movie with a Black director and nearly all-Black cast—the film featured soaring shots of fictional Wakanda’s capital that included sophisticated maglev trains and streetcars. The movie triggered a torrent of think pieces about its immaculate mobility systems, with headlines including “The Attainable Wonders of Wakandan Transit,” “Black Panther’s Wakanda Is a Transportation Utopia with a Dash of Reality,” and “‘Black Panther’ Succeeds as Urban Utopia: There Are No Cars in Wakanda.”2
That was no accident. Director Ryan Coogler was explicitly inspired by Oakland and San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system when envisioning Golden City’s transportation network.3 Sure, viewers weren’t privy to relevant details like scheduling or fare payments (or anything about what life is like in a society ruled by a “benevolent dictator” like T’Challa).4 But Janette Sadik-Khan, former commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation, still tweeted that it was “one of the first movies to get urbanism right, with a transit-friendly, walkable Wakanda.”5
Sadly, that vision came crashing down as soon as you left the movie theatre. One Twitter user, who tagged New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority in their post, mused: “There’s nothing quite like experiencing a technologically advanced Wakanda only to come back to reality and experience a broken ass transit system underground in between stations overheating with no service.” Others complained about the notoriously dilapidated transit network in Washington, DC, a system so underfunded that it’s now auctioning off the naming rights to its new subway stations.6 One user recommended the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority “send a delegation to Wakanda to check out their transit system,” while another tweeted: “The first thing Wakanda should do for the world is fix WMATA.”7
Such a rude awakening, from theatre to train, encapsulates the unfortunate reality facing riders in almost every city in North America. Public transportation is in seriously bad shape. Ridership numbers are far from the only way to evaluate the transit crisis—but they’re a fine place to start. The decline started in 2015, after an all-time ridership record the year prior.8 Between 2014 and 2017, total ridership in the United States fell by a startling 6 percent.9 Bus ridership plummeted by over 14 percent.10 A shocking 31 of the country’s 35 largest transit systems lost ridership between 2016 and 2017.11
Even New York City—by far the largest transit system in the U.S., so big that it’s often excluded from national averages because it skews the data—experienced sizable losses after several years of sustained increases. Between 2016 and 2017, the city’s subway ridership dropped by almost 30 million rides, while buses lost 35 million rides.12 Chicago, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia all experienced declines.13 “I think it needs to be considered an emergency,” said renowned transit planner Jarrett Walker.14 And these trends continued into 2019.15
Canada has somewhat bucked the trend; most remarkably, Vancouver’s ridership increased 7.1 percent in 2018, reiterating its role as one transit leader in North America.16 But most cities in North America are in serious trouble.
This isn’t a new crisis. Public transit has been systematically neglected in favour of the private automobile for decades. Around three-quarters of Americans have driven to work since 1990, with transit use flatlining at around 10 percent.17 In Canada, about two-thirds of commuters drive to work, with 25 percent of Toronto residents and 23 percent of Montrealers using transit.18 But in the European Union’s 72 largest cities, an average of 49 percent of people use transit to get to work, and it’s as high as 74 percent in Vienna.19
Such usage isn’t due to some innate Europeanness that North Americans are unable to access. In fact, many of the cities that we think of as the most progressive on this front were themselves once dominated by cars. It was mass struggle in Amsterdam in the 1960s and 1970s that forced politicians to turn against car-centric design and introduce widespread cycle paths.20 The transit geographies of Europe are the result of specific policy decisions to promote non-automotive means of transportation: options that governments on this side of the Atlantic have consciously refused or undermined. As a result, transit and active transportation are still technically options in North American cities—but they’re by no means reliable, efficient, or affordable.
Much of the blame for the recent ridership decline has been placed on the rapid growth of ride-hailing services (also known as transportation network companies, or TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft.21 Such companies certainly add to congestion and poach affluent riders from transit routes. But they only represent the tip of an iceberg formed by decades of city planning and highway construction that premised the private automobile as the ideal form of transportation and administered austerity on transit agencies. Between 2010 and 2019, the U.S. added 1,200 miles of new transit infrastructure—and 28,500 miles of new roadway.22
A study by New York City’s TransitCenter found that private car trips are rapidly replacing transit rides, with 2018 serving as a record year for per capita mileage.23 Companies like Uber and Lyft are playing a part—but the researchers concluded it’s still mostly people driving their own private vehicles that’s taking away ridership from transit. As TransitCenter’s director of research Steven Higashide put it to Government Technology: “None of this is to discount the role that TNCs are playing. But we do think it’s important for cities to keep in mind that it really comes down to these basic questions of, does transit deliver a competitive travel plan or not? And for the most part, if it doesn’t, you’re still seeing people buying private vehicles.”
The situation is worsening in many communities. Not because public transportation is outdated, unwanted, or too costly. It’s that the very concept of a new generation of automobiles—first a proliferation of personal electric vehicles, then ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, and eventually autonomous vehicles (AVs) of some form or another—are being wielded by austerity-minded politicians as reasons to not invest in public transportation. These “three revolutions” in transportation are widely proclaimed as the inevitable way of the future, and they’re sapping our ability to plan transit for the public good.
In late 2019, a commissioner for Michigan’s Macomb County argued that Detroit’s transit system should be replaced by ride-hailing subsidies for low-income residents (everyone else would pay full rate).24 A referendum in Nashville to approve an ambitious $5.4 billion transit plan was defeated by a Koch brothers–backed opposition; one city councillor suggested that residents should vote against the proposal because “driverless buses will be ready in 12 months.”25
Marta Viciedo, director of Miami’s Urban Impact Lab, told me that many decisions in South Florida are being made on the promise of autonomous vehicles; city leadership used it to recently justify highway extensions. In late 2019, Ontario’s Conservative government cancelled $1 billion in funding for a light rail system in Hamilton; earlier that year, it became the first province to allow autonomous vehicle testing without a human driver at the wheel and committed $40 million to an auto sector plan that would help develop autonomous vehicle infrastructure.26 A prolonged bias toward privatized transportation is finding new justification.
Worsening transit service leads to stagnating or declining ridership, which in turn is used to justify more service cuts. Jarrett Walker, author of the indispensable Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives, identifies seven demands that riders require before relying on public transportation:
But few politicians ride the bus, meaning they rarely have to think about these needs. “Politicians don’t use transit,” Vince Puhakka of Toronto’s TTCriders told me. “They can afford to take Uber home from their restaurant. It’s a form of elite projection. They think everyone can do what they do.”
Elected officials are thus quick to blame ridership losses on a host of other factors: low gasoline prices, Uber and Lyft, telecommuting, lack of congestion pricing or carbon taxes. But loss of transit ridership is ultimately caused by the sustained failure of governments to fund and prioritize service in a way that fulfills those seven rider demands and creates an actual alternative to automobility. (I use automobility to refer to the driving of all personal vehicles including cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans, as well as the broader political and cultural biases that justify its continuance.) The main culprit is austerity, unleashed most intensely on low-income communities.
If transit is funded by governments at all, it tends to be big infrastructure projects: new rail lines, stations, or upgrades. Every politician loves a ribbon cutting. Certain types of transit modes (usually rail) and sheer distance of track become fetishized as intrinsically beneficial, without much consideration of quality of service.28 Such capital spending is important, of course; many communities do need new rail lines. There is also an estimated $90 billion backlog of public transit modernization needs in the United States.29
In some major cities, conditions have become beyond absurd. In 2016, a Twitter account and website called IsMetroOnFire.com tracked which subway lines in Washington, DC, were literally on fire, as well as constant delays and multi-day shutdowns due to deferred maintenance.30
With only a few exceptions, federal governments in the U.S. and Canada have never meaningfully funded operating costs of running transit, leaving many transit agencies with functional infrastructure but without the means to run it at full capacity. You can’t operate buses without drivers. Ride-hailing and talk of imminent autonomous vehicles provide a convenient distraction to these realities.
“The main threat of autonomous vehicles is a political threat. We know that autonomous vehicles, if they ever arrive, may be decades away. Yet a lot of elected officials and a lot of other decision makers sometimes talk about them as if they’re going to be here tomorrow, as if that means we should just rip up traditional transit systems. The bigger threat is not that the technology somehow disrupts transit. It’s that in many cases it empowers politicians who are always looking for some reason to cut public transit.”
—Steven Higashide, TransitCenter, New York City
The irony is that many improvements to public transportation can be both simple and affordable. Dedicated bus lanes with traffic signal priority can have immediate impacts on reliability and efficiency of transit—and require only a few buckets of paint and new traffic light hardware. Other changes, like all-door boarding and off-board fare payment, can reduce the amount of time it takes riders to get on a vehicle.
Big infrastructure projects such as rail line repairs and a new fleet of electric buses, or service improvements like free public transit and hiring more drivers, may require more planning and money. But ultimately, no more than what’s currently shelled out on automobility, especially when its impacts on climate, public health, and poverty are accounted for. The austerity that transit is subjected to is by no means consistent; governments massively subsidize fossil fuels and automobile usage both directly and indirectly. But as the late transit expert Paul Mees argued, we don’t need to wait for sprawled communities to miraculously densify before providing quality public transportation: the answer is consistent funding, public ownership, and common-sense planning by people who actually ride transit.31
What is required for transit to succeed is real, unwavering political commitment and funding, fought for by transit workers and riders. Seattle, for example—which has emphasized cooperation between rail and buses, consistent off-peak service, and several incentives to buy monthly passes (including transit passes considered a job benefit)—has bucked the trend to great success. Ridership there has increased by 50 percent since the early 2000s.32 After years of plummeting usage, transit systems in New York City and Washington, DC, saw recent upticks in usage following significant investments in system maintenance and upgrades.33
Communities that prioritize transit service in funding and planning see increased usage.34 Recognition of that reality is what companies like Uber and Lyft are siphoning. They capitalize on real flaws and criticisms of public transportation with convenient apps and tens of billions in venture capital funds to make it seem like they’re offering a revolutionary service that renders transit obsolete.
New tricks like Netflix-inspired transportation subscription services or heavily subsidized arrangements with small towns to provide “transit” with ride-hailing vehicles mask a simple truth: that all companies like Uber and Lyft bring to the table is an elite taxi service that has successfully evaded regulations, suppressed wages to record-low levels, and downloaded most costs onto drivers.
The allure of the venture-capital-backed services is convincing many policymakers that the solution to transportation woes is far more private vehicles—and in turn, an abandonment or even outright opposition to public transit. Once allowed into a city, these firms become exceedingly difficult to regulate.35
There’s also no guarantee such firms will stick around. In late 2019 the car-sharing service Car2Go, owned by Daimler of Mercedes-Benz fame, announced it was pulling out of North America due to “the volatile state of the global mobility landscape.” Other ridiculous experiments like Uber’s $200 per trip helicopter service between Wall Street and JFK airport reiterate that such companies don’t care about improving service for all, only profiteering off the whims of the rich.36 Relying on such fickle private companies is no way to plan a transportation system.37
A war for streets and communities is currently under way. It’s the same war that created automotive dominance and sprawled, racially segregated regions in the first place. Doubling down on such commodification with the “three revolutions” of next-generation vehicles including electric, ride-hailing, and autonomous vehicles will likely lead to greater emissions, worsened inequality, more sprawl and dangerous streets, and even less accessibility for seniors, people with disabilities, and women, trans, and gender non-conforming people. Conditions are also moving quickly in this direction. But it’s not inevitable. Communities can fight back—and force politicians to build better public transportation, as part of a much greater struggle against the forces of inequality and oppression.
“We have to recognize that the status quo of policy neglect is one of the things that’s leading to lower transit ridership in recent years,” Higashide told me. “It’s going to take concerted action to turn it around. But we’ve seen it happen in enough places to know that it’s possible.”
Public transportation is usually, and correctly, imagined as buses, light rail, streetcars, and subways operating in a large city. But it also means intercity buses and passenger rail, minivans and minibuses, and paratransit for people with disabilities. The key aspects for the purposes of this book are that the vehicles and systems are publicly owned, driven by professional and preferably unionized workers, and operating for socially beneficial purposes—not private profits. Such a vision can encompass the largest city to the smallest town.
In many parts of the world, public transit is a fully functional part of society.38 Yonah Freemark, founder of the U.S. transit blog the Transport Politic, stresses that he doesn’t think there is any reason to think transit doesn’t have a future. “If you look at conditions outside of the United States,” he told me, “the situation is far more optimistic, and ridership has maintained or grown in most major cities. And that’s because of significant additional investments they’ve made and improvements in services provided. Those have resulted in basically people wanting to use the services. I see no reason to think that wouldn’t be the same in the U.S. and those trends wouldn’t continue.”
That doesn’t mean that cities like Seattle or Vienna are perfect in how they approach transit. Even the best services can be enmeshed in politics of privatization and gentrification. But we can learn from the successes of such places, while we struggle against the forces of private capital accumulation and commodification that distort the public mandate of transit.
This book provides some of the information necessary to resist the incursions of more (and new) automobiles in our cities and towns—and to advocate for more free, reliable, accessible, and pleasurable public transportation. It touches on cycling and pedestrian infrastructure along the way: after all, every transit user starts or ends their journey on foot, bike, or mobility aid like wheelchair or scooter. But as Paul Mees argued: “Unless public transport is so convenient that it offers real competition to the car, then schemes to promote walking and cycling, and restrain car use, will founder.”39 My priority is to make a strong case for transit in the face of next-generation automobiles, with the expectation that such struggles will greatly improve the experiences of cyclists and pedestrians. Measures like lowering speed limits and reducing street space dedicated to automobiles will increase safety for everyone, and allow for more square footage and funding to be devoted to sidewalks, cycle tracks, and transitways.
To make that case, this book is divided into three parts. Part one, Depot, briefly examines the history of automobility in North America, the rapid privatization of transportation, and the political economy of the “three revolutions.” It is the failures of transit in many places that have allowed public support for next-generation automobility to take hold. Part two, Departure, is broken up into seven subject-based chapters: climate and environment, economic and racial inequality, safety and congestion, genuine accessibility for marginalized people, data privacy and surveillance, rural and intercity service, and labour unions. In each, the supposed benefits of next-generation automobility are explored, as well as their potential limitations. Then, the often-serious flaws of public transportation are acknowledged, before moving on to the incredible potential to improve such modes with proper funding and democratic planning. These short subject-based chapters are not exhaustive; they are principally intended to provide basic information to counter claims of next-generation automobility. Part three, Destination, concludes with descriptions of how public transit systems should be funded and planned.
I interviewed forty-eight experts for this book, including community activists, academics, transit planners, authors, and journalists. Some of the most exciting work around transit politics is happening in other countries, including in the Global South. However, my focus here is on the U.S., with additional interviews and examples from Canada. Of large countries, the two nations feature among the highest per capita emissions in the world, more than double the global average.40 Much of that pollution comes from transportation. Other countries have much to teach us about public transportation, but this project’s focus is on the problems that face North America and how its communities can fight back.41
Before we begin, allow me to clearly articulate six of the book’s fundamental assumptions.
1. Transportation systems must be publicly owned, operated, and planned to succeed. The aim of private firms—manufacturers, ride-hailing services, or autonomous vehicle aspirants—isn’t to genuinely improve the ability for everyone to get around. It’s to dominate the market share and maximize profits. Privatization of transportation almost always leads to higher fares, worsened service, unexpected stoppages, and fragmentation of networks. Private companies are also much harder to gather information about, effectively regulate, or hold to account.42 A central assumption is that truly public transportation remains the best system to guarantee accessibility, affordability, and reliability. And that despite its failures, we—transit riders, potential riders, and workers, and all of us who have to sell our labour power to survive—must fight to make it the best that it can be. The ultimate goal of radical transit politics should be fully democratized control, with riders having legitimate power over decisions. That said, current but often problematic systems of state ownership keep democratization within the realm of possibility.
2. Everyone has a “right to the city.” This idea, advocated for by the likes of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and British geographer David Harvey, conceptualizes the city as a key site of struggle against the manifestations of capitalist production and state power. Many social movements are grounded in the right to the city, including universal access to quality housing, good food, and free transit. It’s not just about securing vastly improved public housing and services, however, but an ongoing quest to “make and remake ourselves and our cities,” as Harvey put it in his famous 2003 essay.43 This book’s over arching critique is grounded in the argument that such privately owned modes violate the right to the city for many residents. Conversely, public transit holds the potential for a greatly expanded sense of right to the city, practically (being able to use a bus to get to an appointment or grocery store) as well as politically (having true power over decision-making). Despite its name, this right extends to towns and rural areas.
3. The book is anchored in American sociologist Mimi Sheller’s paradigm of “mobility justice,” which views urban and regional transportation as one part of a set of struggles that range from micro issues such as disability and gender to transnational issues such as climate change and migration policy.44 Sheller identified a “triple crisis” of mobility: the climate crisis, urbanization crisis (automobility, poverty, evictions), and refugee crisis. All are unfolding in territories with brutal legacies of chattel slavery and colonial genocide; militarized border walls, rampant gentrification, and mass incarceration are only the latest updates. Sheller told me, “If you’re not aware of the broader geographical and spatial patterns of social injustices, you’re probably just going to make them worse.” Transit access remains horrifically poor for many Indigenous and Black communities, worsened by racist policing and security—and we must work to undo this ongoing oppression. Struggles must also be anchored in explicit class terms. Automotive dominance is an outcome of prioritizing private capital accumulation over mobility rights. Many policymakers emerge from, or have ties to, powerful capitalist interests. These affili ations impact for whom cities and regions are built. Public transit agencies themselves often reproduce racist, exclusionary, and classist politics—but transit history is also marked by instances of riders fighting back to build a better society.
4. Improving transit to the point of it serving as a dominant mode for a majority of the population will require the phasing out of private automobiles. Street space is a zero-sum game: every additional car, SUV, truck, or minivan on the road adds to congestion and slows other modes down. For the benefits of buses and trains to be maximized, car traffic must be reduced: dedicated transit lanes, traffic signal priority, lower speed limits for private automobiles, and outright bans from certain parts of the city. These policies will undoubtedly provoke anger from many drivers, which is why they must be paired with greatly reduced or free fares and improved service to low-income and low-density areas. Automobility means that a driver can get to any part of a city or region, at any time of day, in a reasonable span. Cities serve that desire by paving every street to every house.45 While transit can’t perfectly replicate this—transfers, for instance, may be required on many routes—with proper funding, it can offer many of the same benefits. Public transportation must be funded as oppositional to automobility. We can either have continued automotive dominance or great transit. It’s one or the other.
5. Catastrophic climate change is already here—and it’s about to get far, far worse. A devastating 2018 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world has to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and achieve zero emissions by 2050 in order to keep average temperatures under 1.5°C of warming from pre-fossil-fuel times.46 That will require a radical transformation of society, including a wartime-like buildout of renewable electricity generation and electrification of transportation and heating and cooling of buildings. We don’t have time to waste or mistakes to risk. Boosters of next-generation automobility promote personal electric vehicles as a solution to climate change. But there’s a great deal of uncertainty about timelines, driver preferences, behavioural psychology, and whether ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles will be fully electrified. The only mode of transportation that we can guarantee will roll out as planned is the century-old technologies of public transportation. Fledgling environmental movements like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have communicated well the dire urgency facing society, but have so far rarely engaged with the threats of automobility. Transit, along with housing, are key climate policies, and we must organize with that in mind.
6. Transit is a powerful and multifaceted issue to organize around. Riders are often centrally located in bus stops and train stations, where they can be approached to have a conversation, sign a petition, or be invited to an organizing meeting. Transit offers an opportunity to build power around an issue that many people can viscerally relate to and want to see improved. This movement must be led by both transit riders’ organizations and transit workers’ unions, whose membership often bears the brunt of austerity measures and the ensuing anger of riders at transit’s costs and unreliability. Labour and fare strikes are great weapons to collectively exert power and demand rapid improvements.47 Transportation is also linked to many other issues including housing, food, and access to healthcare, education, and social services: unless you can reliably get to a medical appointment or grocery store, improvements in those sectors can’t be fully accessed. That opens up potential for partnerships between transit organizing and other struggles including tenants’ unions, minimum wage campaigns, and anti-carceral activism—which allows for analysis of the interlinked impacts of austerity, racism, and the climate crisis. Unions representing workers in other sectors can fight to include improved transit access for their members, which can in turn improve service for everyone. Through a focus on the class dimensions of transit, victories can come from unexpected places. As transit activists are demonstrating around the world, the demand for free transit is an especially powerful one that unites struggles for climate action, police abolition, and disability rights.48
Public transportation represents an immediately buildable set of technologies that we can use to make and remake communities, combatting capitalism, colonialism, and racist state violence. Transit doesn’t require years more testing, thousands of engineers, and tens of billions of dollars more in investments to perfect; we know that buses, trains, and streetcars work, as they have for over a century. The issue is about much more than physical bus chassis and routes. It concerns the ability for the working class to exert power over how cities and towns are built and for whom. The only thing that stands in the way of success is further capitulation to capitalist power that seeks to further remake the world in its own image. But first, we must come to terms with the existing state of transit and the promises of the “three revolutions” that seek to deliver its deathblow.