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As broader crime measures fell nationwide, starting in the early 1990s, people felt more comfortable crowding into trains and buses with strangers. Increased public safety and public prosperity got more people using transit. Mostly, though, just as in New York, these cities’ older transit systems benefited from new trains and track repairs that made service more reliable and frequent. In the 1980s, Boston’s MBTA extended the Red Line to serve more outlying commuting areas in Cambridge Philadelphia’s SEPTA joined its two main central railroad lines via a new central-city tunnel, forging one commuter-rail network Chicago’s CTA extended a rail line through northwest commuting neighborhoods to O’Hare airport. By 1997, just one or two murders were occurring in the subways yearly. A decade later, starting in 1990, transit police chief William Bratton ensured that New York’s subways were not just dependable but safe: the preventive policing that he pioneered reduced murders in the transit system from 26 in 1990 to single digits within three years. Richard Ravitch, the real-estate developer turned MTA chairman, persuaded Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature to fund a full-scale rebuilding of the MTA’s physical assets, including new, graffiti-free train cars and refurbished tracks and stations. In the early 1980s, American cities turned this trend around by reviving existing transit systems. On older systems, though, customers shunned increasingly unreliable service on dilapidated trains and broken-down tracks, and ridership kept falling. San Francisco opened its Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) network in 1972 Washington, D.C., launched its Metro rail in 1976. Congress provided states with at least modest financing, mostly directed toward building new transit systems, not maintaining existing rail lines.
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The idea, though never realized, was for this state-controlled authority to build several new transit lines, including a full Second Avenue Subway and a subway across Manhattan’s 48th Street. New York State, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, created the MTA in 1968.
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Several factors-popular opposition to new urban highways, the 1973 Arab oil embargo and ensuing gas crisis, and the budding antipollution movement-led them to reconsider. Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, government leaders realized that they couldn’t abandon transit altogether. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, governments spent little on transportation assets, preferring road construction. Operators let service deteriorate, losing even more riders. Subway and streetcar operators, initially owned by private-sector firms, struggled as riders vanished. After World War II, it fell below 10 billion, as Washington subsidized both home purchases and new interstate highways. In 1926, American transportation systems carried 17.2 billion passengers, Schrag estimates by 1933, the figure was just 11.3 billion. In 1929, a good-government group praised the Westchester prototype: “It is desirable to promote the planning of more highways.” In the early 1920s, New York opened its Bronx River Parkway to bring New Yorkers north to suburban Westchester County. Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, Columbia University’s Zachary Schrag observes, “the transit industry spiraled downward.” Automakers began selling millions of vehicles to middle-class customers, who used them to commute to burgeoning suburbs states, cities, and suburbs, in turn, remade their streets for the auto, ripping up streetcar tracks and ditching subway expansions in favor of early highways. Unless Congress, governors, and mayors figure out how to get more people back on trains and buses regularly, the already brittle urban success story of the twenty-first century will crack.Īmericans ditched mass transit after World War I. Successful cities thrive on density transit enables it. The transit crisis is also an urban crisis. American public transit faces its biggest crisis since city dwellers deserted cramped apartments and sweaty subways for suburban homes and the private car, beginning a century ago. Three years later, even as American life has mostly returned to normal, with planes and restaurants full, the nation’s mass-transit systems still struggle with double-digit ridership declines. On March 18, 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to rage in New York, and two days after the city shuttered its schools and four days before the city forbade white-collar workers from coming to their offices, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the regional subway, bus, and commuter-rail system, warned investors in its nearly $44 billion in municipal debt: “People may permanently alter their commutation behavior after this crisis.”