Reason #5 Most Americans Don’t Ride Transit: Our Cities Aren’t Built for It
13th January 2017
Housing, jobs, and other destinations are so diffused throughout American urban areas that they don’t generate the large numbers of people moving from one point to another that mass transit systems need to work.
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Urban and transit evolution parted ways in 1913, when Henry Ford built the first moving assembly line to make his Model Ts. Cheap cars were an obvious threat to transit, but a bigger threat was less visible: unlike steam-powered, belt-driven factories, moving assembly lines required lots of land, so factories moved to the suburbs. When the suburbs refused to be annexed to the cities, monocentric cities became polycentric urban areas.
At least through the 1970s, urban planners and central city officials pretended their cities were still monocentric, and they wrote numerous downtown plans, urban renewal plans, transit plans, commuter-tax plans, and other plans designed to maintain the preeminence of downtown. The construction of the San Francisco BART and Washington Metro systems were among these plans, but were as doomed to fail as all the others.