this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Indeed, when you experience the public transportation system in the 1st World EU countries and Japan, the USA is decades behind them. However, if you look at the US public transportation system until the mid 1960's, it was there.
On that note, it's worth bringing up that Los Angeles, a city known for its horrible traffic conditions, once had the largest electric rail system in the world before it was completely eliminated in favor of the gridlocked highways it has now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric
All explained in the documentary, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I think thinking of it this way only makes sense if commitment and desire to create good public transportation is somewhat comparable - which it's not. In the US (and a lot of Canada) there simply isn't any desire to properly invest in public transit. When public transit projects fail and a government is held accountable at the ballot box, the following government just slashes everything and washes their hands of it instead of trying to fix things. They're not behind in time, they're behind in commitment.
There's plenty of desire here, there's just no desire in our overlord billionaire class.
Fortunately for our billionaire overlords, we're still very fond of them.
Exactly, and it's good old fashioned racism that they use to get away with it, too.
Public transit still has a stigma in many parts of the US as being for poor people who can't afford cars. And as it happens, nonwhite Americans are a lot more likely to be economically disadvantaged due to institutionalized racism. On top of that, they are also a lot more likely to live in urban environments where there is some semblance of public transit due to the phenomena of white flight, where white people by-and-large started moving out of cities to get away from the coloreds, and so riding the train or taking the bus has become "out of style".
Basically, a white middle class American is likelier to reject the option of public transit because they don't want to share space with poor minorities, and so public transit is limited to urban pockets surrounded by an impenetrable wall of NIMBYism. Plus no one with the resources to afford a car wants to support measures to create more environments where cars are not needed, so attempts to improve existing public transit often fail.