WI/AHC: More Mass Transit in the United States?

[Workable Goblin]

For various reasons, in the 1940s and 1950s there was a sea change in the way that new developments in the United States were built. Whereas earlier in the century suburbs and similar outlying areas were usually built around a public transport link connecting the area to the central city and its major employment centers, in the 1950s suburbs switched to being highly car-dependent. Not only were the streets laid out so that traveling by car was necessary for anything besides walking over to the neighbor’s (ironically, this was frequently done under the guise of calming traffic and providing a safe space for pedestrians!), but travel outside of the suburb meant going via highway, with no other local transport links.

Now, of course part of the reason for this was the major federal investment in interstate highways, which at this point can’t really be averted—there are perfectly sound reasons to build them, after all. But much of this focus on highway construction was local, as well, with municipalities and states making large investments in building improved and expanded roads and highways to transport travelers from the edge of the city into downtown and back again, even on routes that weren’t interstates or even federal highways, and neglecting parallel investments in other forms of transport.

So my question is what if these local investments went into building mass transit systems—commuter rails, subways, or similar systems as appropriate to each city—at the very least in addition to, if not instead of, these highways and roads? At least in principle this seems to offer certain obvious advantages: a rail line has a higher capacity for a given area of space used than a road link, rails generate ticket revenue to help offset costs, unlike roads, the rails aren’t necessarily the responsibility of the government, and so on and so forth. What would it take for this change to take place, and what would the effects of such a change be?

Note that unlike a lot of questions about avoiding the Interstate system or keeping streetcars, this doesn’t require a wholesale cultural shift in the era; the model would be one where the Mrs. drives hubby to the railroad station the suburb is built around on local streets and roads, then drops him off to head downtown to his job by train, while she herself has the car for all of her daily chores at home. Perhaps, from time to time, they would take a road trip with their two kids using the Interstates, but in day-to-day life the car is just used for getting around their local area. In other words, a basically ‘50s lifestyle, just with rail the expected or at least a major form of transport between suburbs and the central city. This seems like an easier ask than reversing major societal trends...

 

[Gunnarnz]

I've seen it suggested that car-dependent suburbs were a deliberate way of preventing blacks, immigrants, minorities and the urban poor from being near the mostly white middle class. Note that owning a car requires more up-front costs and probably lifetime costs than simply taking the train. If there's any truth in this, then you WOULD need some significant social and cultural changes to get mass transit taken up widely.

 

[Dunning Kruger]

I've seen it suggested that car-dependent suburbs were a deliberate way of preventing blacks, immigrants, minorities and the urban poor from being near the mostly white middle class. Note that owning a car requires more up-front costs and probably lifetime costs than simply taking the train. If there's any truth in this, then you WOULD need some significant social and cultural changes to get mass transit taken up widely.

I think that's more true now, where suburbs restrict bus routes, than it was in the past, particularly pre-white flight. You're expecting a lot to believe that a property developer would explicitly think that far ahead in 1950.

 

[Dunning Kruger]

Businesses would lobby for better road infrastructure. Let's say your company distributes stuff to all the corner drug stores around a city. Your delivery trucks need adequate streets to meet their deliveries. Add in the added infrastructure for people not going to city centers (teachers, salesmen, doctors) and the roads were going to be built out anyway.

I think the only way mass transit retains its role in American life is if fuel costs are higher than OTL - coal is much cheaper than gasoline. That requires different geology in Texas, which is by board definition, ASB.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Businesses would lobby for better road infrastructure. Let's say your company distributes stuff to all the corner drug stores around a city. Your delivery trucks need adequate streets to meet their deliveries. Add in the added infrastructure for people not going to city centers (teachers, salesmen, doctors) and the roads were going to be built out anyway.

Some roads, yes, but product distribution and suburb-suburb transport (especially in the 1950s, when the latter tended to be ignored anyway) does not require anything like the elaborate highway networks that were actually built. Those existed to allow suburbanites to drive downtown to work and then drive back home for dinner, nothing more nor less. As I said, the question is what would happen if local and state governments had at least also been funding the expansion of mass transit to service these growing suburbs, while funding less--not no--highways and other major road systems alongside.

I also disagree with your second point; there has been periodic interest and even funding in trying to revitalize mass transit in the United States from the 1960s onwards. Many of these measures were failures, yes, but not all of them, and it shows that even in the absence of high fuel prices there are factors that make people interested in transit, like congestion and smog.

 

[Workable Goblin]

I've seen it suggested that car-dependent suburbs were a deliberate way of preventing blacks, immigrants, minorities and the urban poor from being near the mostly white middle class. Note that owning a car requires more up-front costs and probably lifetime costs than simply taking the train. If there's any truth in this, then you WOULD need some significant social and cultural changes to get mass transit taken up widely.

That wouldn't have been necessary in the 1940s and 1950s, because explicit segregation was legal. You don't want blacks in your suburb--you simply write a covenant that says "no blacks". There, done. No need to be subtle. That doesn't come in until the 1970s, after racial covenants and redlining were outlawed.

 

[Dunning Kruger]

Some roads, yes, but product distribution and suburb-suburb transport (especially in the 1950s, when the latter tended to be ignored anyway) does not require anything like the elaborate highway networks that were actually built. Those existed to allow suburbanites to drive downtown to work and then drive back home for dinner, nothing more nor less. As I said, the question is what would happen if local and state governments had at least also been funding the expansion of mass transit to service these growing suburbs, while funding less--not no--highways and other major road systems alongside.

I also disagree with your second point; there has been periodic interest and even funding in trying to revitalize mass transit in the United States from the 1960s onwards. Many of these measures were failures, yes, but not all of them, and it shows that even in the absence of high fuel prices there are factors that make people interested in transit, like congestion and smog.

The congestion and smog came about because of low fuel prices and widespread car adoption in the first place. People and their local governments are usually going to gravitate to the easiest/lowest cost alternative. It's like a river taking the easiest path. It only reroutes when the first option is no longer optimal. I dont hold this to be universal but it seems reasonably true for transportation. If you want to POD, you need to create a problem that didnt exist. Because building roads and autos is too easy and too convenient, particularly in the 50s and 60s when there was so much space available once you got out of the Northeast.

 

[nbcman]

Improve the cost sharing in the Urban Mass Transportation Acts up to what is done for Interstate construction. When a state can choose to get 50% Federal funding for Mass Transportation Projects or 80% Federal Funding for an Interstate project, the Interstate project wins. Also, allow Mass Transportation funds to be used for non-rail projects such as buses would encourage their expansion.

 

[Aphrodite]

The biggest drawback to mass transit is the time it takes to get anywhere. If you drive you go directly where you want to go. With a bus, you have to wait for the bus to arrive. They come about every half hour so that's 15 minutes of waiting on average. Then the bus stops to pick up and drop off other passengers. Sometimes the bus will just stop and wait so it stays on its schedule. You'll probably have to make a transfer or two. In the end, a twenty minute drive often runs about an hour and a half

 

[Gunnarnz]

The biggest drawback to mass transit is the time it takes to get anywhere. If you drive you go directly where you want to go.

Well, maybe you do. Or maybe you drive there, then circle around for 20 minutes looking for a parking spot, eventually choosing one a kilometre away and requiring a 15 minute walk anyway. In the end, a twenty minute drive can take more like an hour.

Incidentally, some of your assumptions about mass transit seem a bit... localised, shall we say. Buses and trains can arrive more frequently than once every 30 minutes if there's a need, such as peak periods. Transfers are not onerous tasks - get off one vehicle, walk to the appropriate platform, get onto the next one. For a country which does mass transit well, consider Japan. Even in rural areas trains are frequent and on time (2 minutes late was considered a sin worthy of profuse apologies). In the cities, trains are BY FAR the most effective and efficient way of getting around (the Paris Metro is also a good example). Mass transit may suck where you are now - it does where I am - but it isn't required to by some universal law. If people devote care, attention, and money to it, it can be very good.

 

[Dunning Kruger]

Well, maybe you do. Or maybe you drive there, then circle around for 20 minutes looking for a parking spot, eventually choosing one a kilometre away and requiring a 15 minute walk anyway. In the end, a twenty minute drive can take more like an hour.

Incidentally, some of your assumptions about mass transit seem a bit... localised, shall we say. Buses and trains can arrive more frequently than once every 30 minutes if there's a need, such as peak periods. Transfers are not onerous tasks - get off one vehicle, walk to the appropriate platform, get onto the next one. For a country which does mass transit well, consider Japan. Even in rural areas trains are frequent and on time (2 minutes late was considered a sin worthy of profuse apologies). In the cities, trains are BY FAR the most effective and efficient way of getting around (the Paris Metro is also a good example). Mass transit may suck where you are now - it does where I am - but it isn't required to by some universal law. If people devote care, attention, and money to it, it can be very good.

Mass transit works where you have population density, which is the exact opposite of suburbs in the post WWII era.

 

[Edward_Elric]

I can think of a few PoDs/scenarios where mass transit remains a core component of US transportation:

- Nationalizing of the railroads during/shortly after WWII. This happened throughout Europe in the aftermath of the war, and they kept on building up/improving rail transit while our systems fell into neglect and bankruptcy by the 70s. Of course, the railroad corporations themselves would be very resistant to this move, so it'd take some leadership in DC even more ambitious than FDR in that whole New Deal stuff.

- Butterflying away the Cold War, or at least the nuclear arms race. The fear of city centers being erased in mushroom clouds provided a major incentive for city dwellers to flee to the 'burbs. Without that worry, there could be more willingness among the key middle-class and upper-class sectors of society to remain within city limits. And by extension, support mass transit.

-more widespread electrification of railroads before WWII. OTL's Northeast Corridor might have very well ended up similar to the formerly busy passenger rail corridors in the Midwest and west coast without all them caternary wires. But that feature has kept passenger rail travel in the region a practical alternative to driving and flying, thanks to the higher speeds it provides. Had the same kinds of investments been made along the various Midwestern corridors (Chicago-St. Louis, Chicago-Milwaukee-Twin Cities, Cincinnati-Columbus-Cleveland etc), we'd have Acela-style systems all over the country by now.

-no Vietnam war, or at least no US involvement comparable to OTL. In 1965, Lyndon B Johnson signed the High Speed Ground Transportation Act, proposing to build a system similar to Japan's recently-opened Shinkansen. Without the war grabbing all the funding and attention away from this and other Great Society programs, there'd be greater focus on an intercity high-speed train service and a chance for more new systems like San Francisco's BART (opened 1972) and the DC Metro (opened 1976).

-no Reagan Revolution/no Neocon shift/surviving New Deal Coalition. From the 80s onward, OTL's politics have increasingly seen one whole segment of elected officials become absolutely opposed to any new major infrastructure plans that aren't more highways and more oil/gas pipelines. Because that's socialism, and only something those people ( (read: inner-city black and brown folks) would want anyway. Without that attitude becoming prominent in the Beltway, it'd be easier for cities to get federal funding for their transit projects.

-Tied into the previous POD: President Moonbeam. Jerry Brown had an interest in high-speed rail going back to his first terms as California governor. An alternate White House under his watch would be at least as pro-HSR as Obama ultimately was. Perhaps a Dukakis administration could do the trick as well, since his home state is along the Northeast Corridor.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

Mass Transit does not turn a profit in most every place it exists.

 

[Gunnarnz]

Mass Transit does not turn a profit in most every place it exists.

Really? Do you mean only places in the USA, or do you mean all around the world?

In any case, if you're looking only at money made from selling tickets, then you're not looking wide enough. Consider the benefits to the economy and society as a whole of roads and motorways - no-one expects them to make a profit, because they are a such a huge general benefit. The same is true of mass transit; it is a public good in the same way as other societal infrastructure items such as roads, water/sewage, etc. If you consider that, then the profits start to look pretty good.

 

[Simon]

So my question is what if these local investments went into building mass transit systems—commuter rails, subways, or similar systems as appropriate to each city—at the very least in addition to, if not instead of, these highways and roads? At least in principle this seems to offer certain obvious advantages: a rail line has a higher capacity for a given area of space used than a road link, rails generate ticket revenue to help offset costs, unlike roads, the rails aren’t necessarily the responsibility of the government, and so on and so forth. What would it take for this change to take place, and what would the effects of such a change be?

I'm not sure that you could feasibly move all the money, or even a majority, over to mass transit as it would be such a seismic change. Trying to add some mass transit alongside the highways is more likely I'd expect.

As I understand things it was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that created the Highway Trust Fund funded by a 3¢ per gallon tax on gas, increased to 4¢ a couple of years later, and later raised to 9¢ with the Highway Revenue Act of 1982. As part of that though they also passed the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 which created the Mass Transit Account with 1¢ of the gas tax going to it. So how about combining the two? When they come to raise the tax to 4¢ in the late 1950s someone important enough to force their view insists on instead increasing it to 5¢ with the extra penny going to a newly created Mass Transit Account operating under the same rules as the main Highway Trust Fund.

Alternatively whilst doing some poking around I came across a mention of a report by the American Municipal Association (AMA) and railroads in late 1959 based on a study of five cities - Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland - that had commuter rail or rapid transit systems titled The Collapse of Commuter Service. Two of the points they made were that with increasing urbanisation over the coming decade cities would grow from 60% to 80% of the population, and that if 25% of the people using mass transit were pushed onto the roads it would cost the five cities $4.4 billion in extra highway capacity or $17.4 billion if all the riders switched to cars. They lobbied Congress in 1960 with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn promising support for legislation the AMA had drafted to create a federal lending corporation to offer long-term, low interest loans for the purchase of new equipment/upgrading of facilities plus a study into federal grants-in-aid for mass transit. It apparently passed the Senate but was then died in the House when it wasn't allowed out of committee.

-No Reagan Revolution/no Neocon shift/surviving New Deal Coalition.

IIRC it was the New Deal that in large part crippled the railroads in the US. Over-heavy regulation meant it was hard to close lines or consolidate, and government agencies set freight charges so that it was difficult to make a decent profit in many places. The best of intentions but an unfortunate outcome, also combined with the very large backlog of maintenance that had been skipped or minimum carried out during WWII coming due.

Mass Transit does not turn a profit in most every place it exists.

Yes? This does seem to assume that it should turn a profit in the first place. I can't speak to other systems but London Underground cover their operating costs with capital costs coming from government funding, this does however come at the expense of some of the highest comparable fares in Europe IIRC.

 

[Workable Goblin]

I'm not sure that you could feasibly move all the money, or even a majority, over to mass transit as it would be such a seismic change. Trying to add some mass transit alongside the highways is more likely I'd expect.

Yes, this is largely what I meant. At most local funding towards transit not highways, but more realistically part of the funding going to transit of some sort, not highways.

As I understand things it was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that created the Highway Trust Fund funded by a 3¢ per gallon tax on gas, increased to 4¢ a couple of years later, and later raised to 9¢ with the Highway Revenue Act of 1982. As part of that though they also passed the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 which created the Mass Transit Account with 1¢ of the gas tax going to it. So how about combining the two? When they come to raise the tax to 4¢ in the late 1950s someone important enough to force their view insists on instead increasing it to 5¢ with the extra penny going to a newly created Mass Transit Account operating under the same rules as the main Highway Trust Fund.

That would definitely be an interesting idea. I think you could combine it with the next part of your post--say, push back that study a few years and have the transit systems start lobbying Congress earlier. Then, when it comes time to up the gas tax, the idea of doing "something" to boost transit and help save a bit of money on building highways is in the air, so the tax gets pushed a little higher to help pay for cities to upgrade or expand their mass transit systems. Then in the 1960s, when the problems of congestion and pollution started to really enter public consciousness and there was a push to build new transit systems (like Washington's or BART or MARTA), there's more federal funding available, and maybe some of those systems end up being a little bigger or there's a few more around, or there's another gas tax kick for even more dedicated transit funding.

IIRC it was the New Deal that in large part crippled the railroads in the US. Over-heavy regulation meant it was hard to close lines or consolidate, and government agencies set freight charges so that it was difficult to make a decent profit in many places. The best of intentions but an unfortunate outcome, also combined with the very large backlog of maintenance that had been skipped or minimum carried out during WWII coming due.

I believe that this started well before the New Deal, in the 1880s. At that time, the railroads were consolidating into local monopolies, and there was a lot of agitation from mostly farmers about the cost of shipping their products to purchasers. That led, IIRC, to a lot of rather onerous state regulations, and some federal regulations, which made a lot of sense in the context of the late 19th/early 20th centuries when you had to use the railroads to move around, not so much later as cars and planes started to compete effectively...

Also, the railroads were actually nationalized during World War I, so there's that.

 

[Simon]

That would definitely be an interesting idea. I think you could combine it with the next part of your post--say, push back that study a few years and have the transit systems start lobbying Congress earlier. Then, when it comes time to up the gas tax, the idea of doing "something" to boost transit and help save a bit of money on building highways is in the air, so the tax gets pushed a little higher to help pay for cities to upgrade or expand their mass transit systems. Then in the 1960s, when the problems of congestion and pollution started to really enter public consciousness and there was a push to build new transit systems (like Washington's or BART or MARTA), there's more federal funding available, and maybe some of those systems end up being a little bigger or there's a few more around, or there's another gas tax kick for even more dedicated transit funding.

Not a bad idea. Doing some more searches the gasoline tax increase to 4¢ was included in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1959. According to 1963 edition of The Statesman's Year-Book, a publication no good home should be without, for the financial year 1960-61 the Highway Trust Fund received $2,925 million in income and spent $2,746 million, which ignoring the economic effects of raising it to 5¢ would have for simplicity's sake works out to $731 million for our proposed Mass Transit Account. Have it operating in a similar manner to the Highway Trust Fund with federal government covering 80% of the costs and the states covering the remaining 20% gives you a potential maximum budget of $914 million for the year. Cities and states can of course spend extra out of their own funds.

 

[Usili]

Just to add as a bit of information on it, there is this discussing it a bit on mass transit from the FHWA on it in regards to the creation of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory/transit.cfm

 

[Workable Goblin]

Just to add as a bit of information on it, there is this discussing it a bit on mass transit from the FHWA on it in regards to the creation of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory/transit.cfm

But of course as alternate historians our job is to try to game out plausible scenarios where supporting transit is politically feasible in the 1950s, even if later or not quite in the decade. Yes, there were very strong forces pushing towards the construction of highways, but that doesn't mean that it was inevitable that the highway system that we actually have got built, or that transit be quite as neglected as it actually was.

For example, one point made in your source is that most transit systems were privately owned and seemed to be doing fine in the 1950s, so there wasn't much interest in putting public monies into them. Okay, so how can we change this? Well, perhaps some of the transit systems go bankrupt and end up taken over by government earlier so that there's a larger public system which is looking at their statistics and foreseeing trouble, therefore willing to ask for money--or at least able to get money from local taxpayers, who might not particularly want to subsidize a profitable (if speciously profitable) private system, but are more willing to hand over a cent or two at the sales tax box for a public system.

And how might this happen? Well, perhaps we can move the Interstate Highway System to be built earlier! This isn't nearly as outlandish as it sounds--there had been interest by the federal government in investing in highway construction since the 1910s, and the first federal grants to states for highway construction were actually distributed beginning in the early 1920s. Already by the late 1930s there were proposals to build a large network of superhighways--Interstates, in other words--and the construction of highways is an obvious fit with other New Deal programs. And, of course, there was the thinking that led to the autobahns of Germany and so on. So, we can posit that the idea of large-scale controlled-access highways gets pushed back about a decade or so, such that people start thinking about the potential economic and military applications (at least in the United States) in the late 1920s instead of the late 1930s. Then, as part of the New Deal, the federal government starts funding and executing, in various degrees the construction of these highways by, say, the mid-1930s--some twenty years earlier than reality.

Transit (and rail) are given a temporary reprieve by World War II, of course; the highways that do exist are used for transport, but construction is largely halted except for segments that have some unusual value for other uses, and the materials that would otherwise be needed redirected into war materiel. Plus, employment skyrockets and buses, streetcars, and commuter trains are stuffed to the gills with people traveling to the new factories and shipyards. But once the war is over highway construction restarts, and private mass transit soon gets into trouble. By the mid-1950s, transit systems nationwide are going bankrupt and having to be turned into public agencies to maintain essential services, while private commuter rail services are being cut back as much as possible as the railroads bleed in competition with cars and trucks. Meanwhile, the new highways are getting congested from the flood of vehicles pouring onto them from the new suburbs, and noxious smogs are becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence in cities across the country. So pressure increases to provide an alternative to driving for at least commuting; the fundamental idea of sprawl isn't changed, but people now want something that skips past congestion and can maybe help with smog, just like they did in the mid-1960s in the burst of transit enthusiasm that led to BART, MARTA, and WMATA. Localities across the country that already have transit systems establish new taxes to help subsidize their systems and pay for new capital projects, and, perhaps, a bill is passed towards the end of the decade or early in the 1960s that leads to a dedicated mass transit carve-out of the gas tax, providing direct federal aid to new projects. New highways continue to be built, of course, but now so do new rail lines, subways, els, and other forms of transit...

Admittedly, this is effectively what happened IOTL, only ten years earlier because the Interstates are built ten to twenty years earlier. I suspect a bit more of the physical capital would have survived to this point even with the earlier construction, though, since more of that time has been spent in unfavorable times for mass expansion of automobile use and the population is a little smaller, so there aren't quite so many suburbs. Plus, it would still allow noticeably more time by the present to develop new or expand old mass transit systems, even if they start out in more or less the same place that they did IOTL in the 1960s.

 

[MichaelWest]

The reality is that the USA was ably served by an almost entirely private for profit "public" transportation system for so long we failed to appreciate it. Moreover the public does not seem to understand that its road infrastructure, as well as some of its other transportation infrastructure, is paid for by public tax funds, thus the public in fact directly subsidizes the Interstates and roads versus other modes, most of which are in part or in whole privately financed. Ironic how the champion of private property uses its tax monies to undercut free enterprise. The issue is how to have a serious debate on transportation and the role of public funding. As an alternative history I think the USA is more likely to have failed to get Congress behind massive public works, this would leave the States, local government and private enterprise to continue building, funding and operating transportation. This is how I approach the issue, I think cities would pave and maintain the streets but do little beyond their limits, they would take over defunct streetcar lines at most, but the interurban would rely on private enterprise minus a regional actor (i.e. County, multiple County compact or State agencies). I think you see more disparity between wealthier cities and states and the less prosperous, and I think you see those disparities growing as the poorer cities not merely fail to catch up but fall behind and lose business as well as citizens. If we kill the federally funded Interstate system then we might get a more holistic approach once the cracks open in the patchwork system we had and would have continued. The Interstates were built while other modes had no obvious failure in sight, it was an add-on that became the replacement, maybe intended but I doubt anyone thought that far ahead. But I think if cities had invested in their public modes then the pressure would be to include them in the mix rather than beg for roads as private systems hit the wall.