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.
