Skyscraper Museum: The Great American Transit Disaster
Yesterday, on May 16, I watched a webinar about The Great American Transit Disaster based on a book written by speaker Nicholas “Nick” Dagen Bloom and published by the University of Chicago Press. The Skyscraper Museum in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City, which is part of New York City, hosted this talk via Zoom with a livestream available on YouTube. Museum founder, director, and curator Carol A. Willis introduced the talk and facilitated the Q & A after the main presentation. Robert L. Fishman, a professor at University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, joined Bloom and Willis in conversation near the end of the talk.
Bloom began his talk with the question, “Was the destruction and subsequent poor quality of mass transit inevitable in twentieth century America?” Some historians believe the rise of automobile culture in the 1940s and 1950s brought the end of mass transit such as streetcars, trolleys, and local trains. This perspective of “Transit Fatalism” made the decline of affordable transportation and the rise of traffic jams and massive parking lots seem inevitable. However, Bloom disagrees. He outlined three types of “transit fortunes”, or how mass transit systems fared from the nineteen-teens onward:
- Common, problematic, private, unsubsidized systems found in Baltimore, MD and Atlanta, GA.
- Uncommon, problematic, public, unsubsidized systems found in Chicago, IL and Detroit, MI.
- Uncommon, successful, public, subsidized systems found in Boston, MA, Washington, DC, and San Francisco, CA.
Mass transit systems faced similar issues regardless of their category. Many cities and its residents fell victim to anti-transit choices by a local government that did not budget for regular operations, created auto-centric city designs, disinvested from non-White communities, and encourage White residents to flee for the suburbs.
In Baltimore, where Bloom grew up, the Baltimore Transit Company (BTC) first became bankrupt in the 1930s and was bought out by the powerful, large company National City Lines (NCL) in 1945. The company deferred maintenance on buses and limited expansion on bus lines. When the BTC came under public ownership in the 1970s, the city emphasized links between the suburbs and the city downtown, not between inner-city neighborhoods, as federal funds only supported the business district. Zoning laws, redlining, declared blight, a failed road called “the Highway to Nowhere”, and other unfair housing practices forced Black families away from accessible public transportation. To this day, Baltimore has few mass transit options.
Chicago fared no better. In 1945, the city took over the streetcar networks once among the best public transportation models in the United States and removed the lines to replace them with buses. The “Pay As You Go” model involving raised fares, cut service, deferred maintenance, and limited expansion, ultimately failed in 1970, as the city never had enough money to modernize the system. Urban renewal project throughout the 1980s exacerbated racial disparity in the city as poorer, Black residents moved to the south, away from mass transit.
Boston had its share of ill-planned urban renewal, redlining, and expensive highway projects with blown timeline and cost overruns like the Big Dig. However, the city continues to expand its transit system, receiving local, regional, and state subsidies to fund projects. The system is modern and boasts astonishingly low fares. The population density of Boston is lower than many American cities with public transit riders spread across the suburban Greater Boston area. While some transit lines were originally built for predominantly White colleges students and suburban commuters, the region has become increasingly diverse. Most astonishing for Bloom is the number of cancelled highway projects starting with an innerbelt and expressway system that citizen activists blocked in 1962. An extension of Interstate 95, frequently cited as one of the most dangerous roads in the United States, instead became part of the Orange Line on the T or MBTA subway system. Every weekday, over 725,000 riders use the MBTA system, which includes the subway, commuter rail, standard buses, The RIDE buses for people with disabilities, and the Boston Harbor ferries.
Through his book talk and subsequent discussion, Bloom concluded that “The destruction and subsequent poor quality of mass transit in twentieth century America was not inevitable.” Car culture and mass transit can coexist if lawmakers and citizen activists work together to choose transportation options that benefit the whole, preserve diverse neighborhoods, create safe and densely populated areas, and decrease the number of empty parking lots.
This was my first time attending a talk hosted by the Skyscraper Museum. I enjoyed the fast-paced presentation and well-designed slides with supplemental maps and photographs of former transportation systems. I did sometimes struggle to understand the speakers, as the closed captions and auto-generated transcript were not enabled on Zoom. Overall, I would gladly attend another talk hosted by the museum. I look forward to reading Bloom’s book The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.