It has to be said that the United States when it does put its mind to something, due to its bigness and confidence, can on occasion do things magnificently. The American motor industry was once the biggest and best in the world before they got complacent and sad. The American electrical goods industry was once the biggest and best in the world before they got complacent and sad.
Big things are best built in community and when people believe in the bigness of the thing. The Dwight D Eisenhower Interstate System is the biggest and most expensive piece of socialist infrastructure in the history of the world and was built because Eisenhower believed in the bigness of America and wanted to get it connected by road for all kinds of reasons. That could have happened with America's railway network but didn't; because when you have plutocrats building their own little empires, they can not believe in the bigness of the thing. The American railway network was once the biggest and best in the world before they got complacent and sad.
I like trains. Specifically, I like suburban rail systems that regular people use. I like the fact that on board public transport, people from the grandest of houses to the meanest of hovels, might be forced to bump shoulders with each other. I like that for not very much money, you can travel from whatever the mundanity of suburbia looks like, to the heart of glittering multi-trillion dollarpound cities. I like the history of the struggles that it took and takes, to bore tunnels through and under cities, the integration and architecture of those systems and the rolling stock which rolls back and forth.
When you think of suburban railway networks, the London Underground, Paris Metro, Tokyo Subway, Moscow Metro, Berlin's S-Bahn and U-Bahn and the New York Subway immediately come to mind. However, when you think suburban railway networks, apart from the New York Subway, it gets really hard really quickly to think of suburban railway networks in a hurry. For a nation of 330 million people, it should not be this difficult.
I do not live in America. I live in the great expanse of Not America; specifically I live in Sydney. Sydney is a city which is bounded on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the sea. Sydney as a swirling conurbation of five million people, has a logical limit which is bounded by an almost perfect 50 mile square. The other thing of note is that the central business district is jammed way over in the eastern side of the city; so all of the transport links are dendritic and are like spokes, with occasional ring roads and ring railway lines to infill the area between the spokes. Part of the railway line that I use to commute to and from work, dates as far back as 1855 and with the exception of a few linking pieces, the bones of the infrastructure of Sydney was either laid down or hinted at by about 1930. The railway infrastructure while adequate, could still be improved and as we go along, eventual legislative pressure is enough to overcome governmental inertia.
And yet here is something that I do not understand, as a city of five million people and a perfectly normal and adequate set of railway infrastructure, if placed in the United States, Sydney's railway systems would be the second biggest.
I won't bore you with numbers but this is horrifying. In terms of ridership, the top ten systems in the United States are thus:
1. New York Subway
2. Wasington Metro
3. Chicago 'L'
4. Boston MBTA
5. San Fransico BART
6. PATH (New Jersey)
7. SEPTA (Philadelphia)
8. MARTA (Atlanta)'
9. ...
10. Metro Rail (LA)
9? Why did I leave out 9? 9 is... the Walt Disney World Monorail.
What does it say about the state of transit in the United States when the Walt Disney World Monorail is the 9th largest rapid transit system in the country?
I am sure that the Walt Disney World Monorail serves its purpose well. It has 6 stations and a couple of linking pieces of track but this still does not change the fact that a monorail is generally a worse option because making trains change direction on a monorail is hard. With a normal railway line shifting a few tangs on a set of points is pretty easy but on a monorail you have to move whole pieces of track. Monorails, including the overhead monorail at Wuppertal, tend to be smallish and non-scalable for that reason. This doesn't excuse the fact though that the Walt Disney World Monorail is the 9th biggest largest rapid transit system in the United States.
The United States knows about trains. The United States really knows about trains. If there was one piece of technology that opened up the great swathes of vast empty nothingness from sea to shining sea, across the amber waves of grain, it was the railroad. Before the motor car and the aeroplane, the steam train was the only thing that could move masses of things at more than a few miles an hour. Cities like Indianapolis which sits on the unnavigable White River, would never have amounted to a hill of beans unless the railroad arrived. Of course, the United States being the torch of capitalism which burns down all other sensible systems of collective purchasing arrangements, was left with many private railroad companies and as a result, it always had an anaemic system.
There are railway companies all over the United States and even to this day, more freight is hauled by rail than by road. Road is fine at moving stuff but rail has the distinct advantage of being able to link many tens of trucks together to move things in bulk. If the United States knows about trains, and it's obvious that the New York Subway and the Chicago 'L' were instrumental in shaping the design and ethos of many other rapid transit systems around the world, then what went wrong?
In part, railways went wrong in the United States because they work so fantastically well. Transport systems are reasonably well specialised. You can put people onto goods trucks but they won't be happy about it. Likewise, bulk haulage of stuff runs to different destinations than where people want to go. Raw material wants to go to factories to be made into goods; goods want to go shops to be sold or to warehouses to be sold later. People do not want to go to factories or warehouses unless they work there. People want to do people things like go to offices, or places in suburbia where they live. Insofar as we can assign anthropomorphic wants to inanimate stuff, goods and stuff has different wants to people.
Here's the rub. There is far less profit to be made in moving people when you can move stuff by the uncountable godzillions of ultraunits. Railway companies in the United States were built around that fact and passenger services were always considered as an after thought. There may have been a small charismatic blip in express services such as the Burlington Express but in general, passenger services have always played second fiddle to freight because they have to run over freight lines. Sydney though, ended up with this completely insane end scenario where we run full-size double deck pullman carriages over what basically amounts to proper heavy railway lines through the suburbs of the city.
All of the rapid transit systems in the United States which are mentioned above, are dedicated passenger railway lines. In that respect they are like the London Underground, Paris Metro, or Tokyo Subway. Building dedicated passenger railway lines and especially those that travel underground, are orders of magnitude more expensive than building freight railway over the surface of the land.
The other thing of note is that the United States just doesn't do the concept of commonwealth and community particularly well. The idea of private enterprise flows so deep in the veins of the country and is stained so deep in the country's muscles, that when it comes to laying down the bones of systems to help the country move, private solutions tend to be preferred most of the time. Private corporations tend not to do anything unless there is a profit to be made or unless they have been coerced into doing something by means of legislative force.
What does it say about the state of transit in the United States when the Walt Disney World Monorail is the 9th largest rapid transit system in the country? It says not a lot about the state of transit in the United States but about who the United States is. Amtrak which is a government transport company, has to negotiate with private companies who own the way, to put their trains on the lines. Every single one of the 10 rapid transit systems mentioned above, with the exception of the Walt Disney World Monorail had to fight tooth and nail for its very existence and even then, in places where should very obviously be an underground railway system such as Dallas, Phoenix, Indianapolis, and to honest Los Angeles, securing public monies for public projects is public nightmare.
America doesn't do trains very well because it doesn't believe in the bigness of the thing. It doesn't really believe in the bigness of community. It certainly doesn't believe in the idea of moving people together when they can all be rugged individuals who ruggedly and individually crawl along roads at 6mph. Ironically, the torch of capitalism burnt out America's confidence to do big commuter rail networks magnificently.
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