Note: This article originally appeared in my monthly newsletter, creatively titled David’s Newsletter. For more on writing, learning, SpongeBob memes, and anything else I decide to send you, subscribe here.
I’m a slut for public transit. I love it. I live it. I’m a proselytizer for it. I think it can be a huge part of literally saving the world.
Today I want to share some of its beauty, and demonize its natural enemy: the automobile.
I think I’m able to see that it’s so incredible because I was raised in a place where it hardly exists at all: Vermont.
Growing up in a rural place, in a town largely developed after the advent of the automobile (the most OVERRATED invention in history), my mind couldn’t help but assume that cars were the only reasonable way to get anywhere.
It wasn’t until I moved to New York in 2019, that I saw the magic that public transit holds.
“You mean, for $2.75 this thing will take me ANYWHERE in the city??? AND I don’t even have to do anything? I can just sit here and read while it takes me there?”
It was an absolute marvel. Over my first semester, I took the train to Brooklyn for punk shows, to Queens for Salvadoran food, to Harlem for Dominican food.
East Harlem, November 2022
I saw the Subway as a microcosm of the city itself. It’s famously diverse, a democratizing force for the city, where both rich and poor collide.
I heard so many languages and thought about how I could probably learn any major world language on the Subway by going from train to train at each stop, looking for someone to practice with.
Yet, I also knew the NYC Subway, like the city itself, was a bit of a disaster. It was dirtier and less punctual than Barcelona’s metro, my only other reference point. It’s underfunded, and antiquated.
Even in this condition, I preferred the cultural experience of the subway, with my book in hand, to driving, 100 times out of 100.
Then, I traveled the world.
In particular, I lived as an urban backpacker, going from city to city, relying entirely on transit. I took the high-speed train from Barcelona to Madrid, from Florence to Milan to Zurich. In Switzerland, I felt the fresh city air dipped my toes in a clean downtown river which people actually swam in, the city nearly free of cars and excessive pollution.
Its transit is so good people prefer it over a personal vehicle. In places with robust transit, I felt free. These cities welcomed me, were mine to discover and explore.
The center of Zurich, June 2022. 5:18 pm (rush hour)
When I returned from Europe and traveled around the US I experienced… the opposite.
Trains were few and far between, so I took buses everywhere I went, from Austin to Phoenix, to even what some consider the impossible: Southern California.
10-minute drives were 45-60 minute bus rides. (30 min drives with traffic, another huge flaw of car-based infrastructure). Why were there such infrequent and slow buses in such highly-populated areas?
I saw how in these places, buses were for “other” people in the eyes of many. The middle and upper classes in American cities, unlike Zurich and Madrid, would never take the public bus.
The people I saw on the bus were mostly Hispanic immigrants and lower-income people. I saw a different side to Austin, Texas, like I was back in Mexico City or Bogotá.
I felt the constriction and lack of opportunity for those who don’t have a car.
I needed to leave at certain times to make the buses and give myself extra time. Determined to take a bus to another bus to another bus, it sometimes took me 90+ minutes to get places within the same city.
I saw firsthand that not everybody in LA, Austin, and Miami has a car, only those who can afford a car, its insurance, gas, yearly inspections, and repairs own a car.
Living this car-free life in a car-based country, I had a sinking feeling that these cities weren’t made for me.
Are Cities Designed for Humans or Cars?
Once walking through Anaheim, California, I felt like an ant in a world made for giants. I needed to wait 3-5 minutes to cross wide boulevards. Sidewalks suddenly ended, leaving me within feet of passing vehicles and the fumes they left behind. I spent minutes going through parking lots, feeling like a stray dog, not sure how to find the entrances to restaurants.
Why were so many of our cities, not designed for humans to live in, but for private vehicles? This is absolutely backward.
It felt wrong to even call them cities. It still feels wrong to call them cities. If I can’t walk to get my groceries, it’s not a city.
Yet, as shitty as the transit is, I still came to love these 60-minute bus rides. I loved seeing all the ads on the bus in Austin in Spanish (a copywriting lesson for another day.)
I looked forward to the space to journal, read, and make small talk, almost always in Spanish.
Yes, it was less convenient than New York and Barcelona, but even here, I preferred it to driving.
Through these journeys, I felt more connected to my country, more aware of our inequalities and how our country runs for those not wealthy enough to own a car.
Through my personal experiences, I saw firsthand the importance of an urbanist principle that cities should be designed for people, not for cars.
I imagined redesigning these places, turning them into places where traffic isn’t ubiquitous, where cars don’t pollute our cities, where we can see the beautiful views of Southern California, instead of staring at an elevated 8-lane highway, and breathing in its fumes.
How do we get there?
With Mass Transit
There are 101 examples of the superiority of mass transit and the downfalls of car culture.
Today I’ll share two specific examples from my city.
Example 1: Your Poop is in The Hudson River
Cars require the vast construction of roads, much more than required for buses or trains. It makes no sense at all to have thousands and thousands of 5-person vehicles with only one person in them, mostly going the same places. The math doesn’t check out.
This means cities like New York are covered in concrete, much more than would be necessary if it were less car-reliant. (Note, this is the least car-reliant city in the US.) This means less green space and narrower sidewalks for that blunt vibrant street life.
More green space in cities is associated with improved mental health and physical health, yet that’s not all. One downside you may not consider is that concrete can’t absorb rain.
This means when it rains hard in New York the sewer system overflows.
The only option for the city is to discharge UNTREATED sewage into the surrounding rivers.
Yes, that means we dump everyone’s poop into the Hudson River.
Better transit would mean less concrete and more green space. Soil can absorb rainwater, lowering the risk of flooding and keeping the waterways clean.
You may think, “Well, the solution is a better sewer system.” But this would require VAST sums of money, and years of construction to dig underground throughout the entire city.
A better solution is to invest in more mass transit to de-incentivize the use of cars and replace highways and roads with walkable spaces.
Example 2: Cars = Higher Asthma Rates
When we think about who’s responsible for the vast construction of highways, at least in New York, we can mostly blame Robert Moses. In the thundering biography by Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Fall of New York, Caro examines how Moses built these roads, and the costs they had to New York and its people.
One such example is the Cross Bronx Expressway, which Caro writes, went through the Bronx, “Disemboweling a dozen communities along the route.”
Immigrant communities were forced to flee and property values plummeted, as nobody wanted to live next to a loud, polluted, traffic-run highway.
This happened across the entire country. When building highways, they were built through the path of least political resistance, which meant through the poor communities, so that rich people (car owners) could have access to cities they often didn’t even live in or pay taxes in.
The suburbs have been a disaster, but that’s a different newsletter.
Current NYC Mayor Eric Adams said last year that the highway, “was a scar carved through the heart of the Bronx, turning bustling streets into ghost towns.”
Today, this highway leads to vastly increased rates of asthma in children. As demonstrated in the study below, children who live near the highway have significantly higher rates. There are higher rates of lung disease in these areas.
A Few Other Quick Thoughts About Why Mass Transit is Just Better
Train lines and bus lanes can come with some similar problems, but unlike a wide, elevated, 4-8 lane highway, mass transit lines, whether bus or train, can carry WAY more people with WAY less construction overall.
Statistically, it’s way safer than driving.
And you get to read while it takes you where you want to go.
Transit = Creation of Walkable Areas
There are so many more elements to this, like for example, when you have mass transit, when people get off their train station or bus stop, it encourages the creation of walkable centers. That’s because, when people commute without a car, they’ll need everything within walking distance of the transit centers.
People who live in walking areas tend to have a higher quality of life and better health outcomes, again for a host of reasons beyond the scope of the newsletter.
Intercity Transit = The Rightful Extinction of Short Flights
I can’t leave you without talking about one of my favorite options: high-speed rail. Although I admit it’s fraught with logistical challenges in the US, it’s absolutely a necessity to get it to the future of getting around. We are one of the only major developed countries without it.
As I read in Flying Green: On the Frontiers of New Aviation, “aviation’s contribution to climate change is grossly disproportionate to the number of people who use it.”
With better mass transit, we could make short flights extinct.
As an example, there’s actually a flight from LaGuardia to Hartford’s Bradley airport. These cities are 117 miles apart.
Barcelona and Zaragoza are 191 miles a part, with a train that takes 1 hour and 23 minutes that comes so frequently you hardly need to plan your departure time. There are no flights from Barcelona to Zaragoza, because, thanks to train infrastructure, it makes no fucking sense.
Any flight under two hours should get run out of business by a high-speed train. No security lines, no bag limitations, wifi the entire time, and no dealing with the god-forsaken, too-big-too-fail airlines.
My Call to You: Take Transit Where You Live
Just do it one time. I promise you’ll learn more about where you live, how it functions for people of lower income levels, and you’ll get to read.
When you do, please let me know.
Second, remember that there can be better options if we make it so. We are the creators of the places we live, and we will be the ones to shape infrastructure and transportation projects in the future.
Whether it’s a local town vote for a new bus route, or voting NO on the construction of a new highway, you can get involved in small ways.
If they tell you the highway is to reduce traffic, run for the hills. Highways in the long term only encourage more vehicles on the road, which causes traffic again, creating a never-ending cycle and more and wider highways, leading to an absolute disaster of traffic and pollution which we see in places like Los Angeles.
Third, if you hear some clown-ass people in the suburbs tell you that cities are dirty, remind them that it’s their highways to get into the cities that make it so, not the city itself.
This was a long and scattered newsletter, but I hope I’ve given you something new to think about with regard to how you move around this planet.
While writing it, I realized there are so many more topics to hit, so this is likely just the beginning of my thoughts on transportation and urbanism.
Un abrazo,
~David
MOre on Transit
I write a lot about my public transit adventures. Check some of them out here.
12 Underrated Rail Routes We Should Build
Brightline Train Florida Review: How’s America’s First (Sorta) High Speed Train?
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