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Transit Gloria Urbis

The mindset has to change from “How many people can we cram in?” to “How many riders
can we entice?”

William S. Lind
Feb 13, 2023 12:00 AM

P ublic transportation—buses, streetcars, light rail, subways,

commuter trains—is a city’s circulation system. It brings people into
the city, moves them around in the business district, and, if they are
suburbanites, takes them home at the end of the day. From a city’s
perspective, cars are a poor alternative. Rush-hour traffic jams drive
people away, cars take up enormous amounts of valuable real estate,
and are hostile to pedestrians, who are a city’s lifeblood. If a city
does not have a large number of pedestrians, especially with
disposable income, it is a dying city. It is no accident that the first
chapters of Jane Jacobs’s magnificent book The Death and Life of
Great American Cities are devoted to sidewalks.

Unfortunately, the corona panic dealt a body blow to public This article appears in the March/April 2023
issue
transportation. New York City, which has the country’s largest
public transportation system, has seen ridership fall to about two- Subscribe Now

thirds of its pre-Covid level. San Francisco’s BART system is

carrying only about one-third of its pre-panic riders. Other big cities
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are showing similar collapses. The umbrella group of most public
transportation systems, the American Public Transportation
Association, recently reported that transit carried 883 million fewer
riders in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same quarter in
2019.

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