The great American transit disaster : a century of austerity, auto-centric planning, and white flight / Nicholas Dagen Bloom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, 1969- author.

Series:

Historical Studies of Urban America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Urban transportation.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (364 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago, Illinois : University of Chicago Press, [2023]

Summary:

A potent re-examination of America’s history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy—all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today’s conversations about public transportation funding.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Introduction

Pre-World War II

Part I. Urban Transit Rise and Decline

Chapter 1. Baltimore: City Leaders versus Private Transit

Chapter 2. Chicago: A Limited Public Commitment to Transit

Chapter 3. Boston: Reverse Engineering Public Transit

The Postwar Transit Disaster, 1945 to 1980

Part II. Unsubsidized Private Transit

Chapter 4. Baltimore: Urban Crisis, Race, and Private Transit Collapse

Chapter 5. Atlanta: Race, Transit, and the Sunbelt Boom

Part III. "Pay as You Go" Public Transit

Chapter 6. Chicago: The Failure of "Pay as You Go" Public Transit

Chapter 7. Detroit: Racism and America's Worst Big-City Transit

Part IV. Public Transit That Worked Better

Chapter 8. Boston Pioneers Public Regional Transit

Chapter 9. San Francisco: Deeply Subsidized Public Transit

Conclusion: Beyond Transit Fatalism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-226-82441-1

OCLC:

1369647635