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Though there are 600 million cars on the planet,
and counting, there are also seven billion people,
which means that for the vast majority of us getting
around involves taking buses, ferryboats, commuter
trains, streetcars, and subways. In other words, |
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traveling to work, school, or the market means being
a straphanger: somebody who, by choice or necessity,
relies on public transport, rather than a privately
owned automobile.
Half the population of New York, Toronto, and |
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London do not own cars. Public transport is how
most of the people of Asia and Africa, the world’s
most populous continents, travel. Every day, subway
systems carry 155 million passengers, thirty-four
times the number carried by all the world’s airplanes, |
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and the global public transport market is now valued
at $428 billion annually. A century and a half after
the invention of the internal combustion engine,
private car ownership is still an anomaly.
And yet public transportation, in many minds, is |
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the opposite of glamour—a squalid last resort for
those with one too many impaired driving charges,
too poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get
behind the wheel of a car. In much of North
America, they are right: taking transit is a depressing |
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experience. Anybody who has waited far too long on
a street corner for the privilege of boarding a
lurching, overcrowded bus, or wrestled luggage onto
subways and shuttles to get to a big city airport,
knows that transit on this continent tends to be |
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underfunded, ill-maintained, and ill-planned. Given
the opportunity, who wouldn’t drive? Hopping in a
car almost always gets you to your destination more
quickly.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Done right, public |
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transport can be faster, more comfortable, and
cheaper than the private automobile. In Shanghai,
German-made magnetic levitation trains skim over
elevated tracks at 266 miles an hour, whisking people
to the airport at a third of the speed of sound. In |
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provincial French towns, electric-powered streetcars
run silently on rubber tires, sliding through narrow
streets along a single guide rail set into cobblestones.
From Spain to Sweden, Wi-Fi equipped high-speed
trains seamlessly connect with highly ramified metro |
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networks, allowing commuters to work on laptops as
they prepare for same-day meetings in once distant
capital cities. In Latin America, China, and India,
working people board fast-loading buses that move
like subway trains along dedicated busways, leaving |
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the sedans and SUVs of the rich mired in
dawn-to-dusk traffic jams. And some cities have
transformed their streets into cycle-path freeways,
making giant strides in public health and safety and
the sheer livability of their neighborhoods' in the |
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process turning the workaday bicycle into a viable
form of mass transit.
If you credit the demographers, this transit trend
has legs. The “Millennials,” who reached adulthood
around the turn of the century and now outnumber |
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baby boomers, tend to favor cities over suburbs, and
are far more willing than their parents to ride buses
and subways. Part of the reason is their ease with
iPads, MP3 players, Kindles, and smartphones: you
can get some serious texting done when you’re not |
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driving, and earbuds offer effective insulation from
all but the most extreme commuting annoyances.
Even though there are more teenagers in the country
than ever, only ten million have a driver’s license
(versus twelve million a generation ago). Baby |
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boomers may have been raised in Leave It to Beaver
suburbs, but as they retire, a significant contingent is
favoring older cities and compact towns where they
have the option of walking and riding bikes. Seniors,
too, are more likely to use transit, and by 2025, there |
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will be 64 million Americans over the age of sixty-
five. Already, dwellings in older neighborhoods in
Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Denver, especially
those near light-rail or subway stations, are
commanding enormous price premiums over |
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suburban homes. The experience of European and
Asian cities shows that if you make buses, subways,
and trains convenient, comfortable, fast, and safe, a
surprisingly large percentage of citizens will opt to
ride rather than drive.
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