THINKING REALISTICALLY ABOUT URBAN TRANSIT.

Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin offers an instructive "What I've Learned From Getting Transit Wrong."  It's worth reading in full.  Let me highlight a few observations.  He first tackles a myth, "people choose not to ride transit."  Sorry, no.  "Years ago, I believed that if someone drove instead of taking the train or bus, it meant they were rejecting transit. That not riding was an active choice against it."

Look no further, dear reader, than any of the Chicago "expressways," several of which have rapid transit lines in the median strip (at the cost of stations the riders have to play Frogger to get to) and a few of which have a Commuter Rail line close alongside.  Those people who are stuck in traffic when the expressways aren't expressing aren't blind to those trains going past: rather, they'll put up with the traffic rather than whatever is less appealing about the L trains or the scoots.  As Mr Clarkin puts it, "Transportation isn’t a binary; it’s a marketplace. People weigh their options and pick what works best for them in that moment, whether that’s transit, a car, a bike, or walking."  He notes that Metro-North's New Haven line serves some of North America's richest suburbs, and people of means use it.  (We'll leave go for the moment the presence or lack of subscription club cars and bar cars.)

More interestingly, he is not a fan of making motoring more miserable.

Close streets to cars. Toll them into oblivion. Problem solved, right?

Yes, restricting car access can work, but only if the alternatives are better or at least equal to the convenience of driving. If not, you’re just forcing people into a choice they resent, which builds bad will toward the very movement trying to help them.

A car-free street in a dense neighborhood with robust transit is almost always a great idea. But a car-free street in a car-dependent suburb? That’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Without first giving people a viable way to get where they need to go, all you’ve done is remove the only option they had.

Unstated subtext?  Lose the urbanist smug.

His argument falls short when it comes to contemplating land use.

I used to think suburban living was an outright rejection of city life. If you wanted walkability, transit, and density, you’d live in the city. If you didn’t, you moved to the suburbs. But that’s not the whole story.

For many people, especially younger families, the suburbs aren’t a rejection of urban amenities; they’re the only affordable option left. In cities like New York, starting a family without a massive income or generational housing is nearly impossible. The housing stock for families just isn’t there.///So people move outward. Not because they hate cities, but because they can’t afford to stay. And here’s the kicker: a lot of them still like the city. They come in for work, for dining, for culture. They just can’t make it their home.

It’s a systemic failure, not a personal choice. Our inability to build enough family-friendly housing in urban areas pushes people out, and then we write them off as “anti-urban,” which only deepens the divide between city and suburb.

The lesson: don’t assume people in the suburbs are “the opposition.” Many of them want the same things transit advocates want. They’re just stranded by a broken housing and transportation system.

That language, "broken system," suggests a category error, thinking of land use patterns and transportation networks as chess-pieces for a Man of System to rearrange, but if you think putting a useful street on a road diet forces people into a choice they resent, now try taking on the rent gradient.

It's a step in the right direction, all the same, a small bet on emergence if you will; and much more edifying than Kate Aronoff's "Republicans Want to Scare You off Mass Transit. Cars Are Scarier."  It's the same order of deflection that we've seen from the same order of people who keep claiming that urban crime is lower now than it was during the corona tyranny and summer of rage.

[Transportation secretary Sean] Duffy’s argument isn’t subtle: Use mass transit, and you’ll get yourself killed. There’s just one problem: He couldn’t be more wrong. According to one recent study, car travel is 10 times as deadly as travel by mass transit. Another report from the nonprofit National Safety Council finds that, for every 100 million miles traveled by passengers, rates of car deaths were 17 times greater than deaths from train travel, and 50 times greater than deaths from bus travel. The United States boasts a road-traffic fatality rate higher than that of any other high-income country. According to data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 8,055 people died in car crashes in the first three months of 2025. While those numbers have fallen since spiking dramatically in 2020 and 2021, longer-term trends show a troubling and longer-term rise. Between 2013 and 2023, road deaths in the U.S. increased by nearly 25 percent. Pedestrian traffic fatalities rose by a whopping 56 percent between 2013 and 2022, per the International Transport Forum’s 2024 Annual Road Safety Report.

The dangers aren’t confined to crashes. Roadway crime, such as car theft and road rage–related violence, is also far more prevalent than crimes committed on public transit. As transportation researcher Todd Litman recently pointed out, mass transit is the setting for a tiny proportion of serious crimes committed: “About 1 in 1,000 murders and 1 in 10,000 reported rapes take place in transit stations or vehicles across the US,” Litman wrote. “Travel by car exposes drivers and passengers to a wider range of criminal threats, including vehicle homicide, road rage and carjacking attacks, and robberies and assaults in parking lots, plus vehicle thefts and vandalism.”

Car thefts, carjackings, robberies and assaults in parking lots, sounds like a ringing endorsement of city life, doesn't it?  Those pedestrian traffic fatalities?  Perhaps those are a consequence of the level of service standards traffic engineers use, but whether those, at the margin, have any effect on modal choice is a stretch.  As far as the crashes themselves?  "On average in 2023, fatal car crashes were more frequent on weekends, peaking on Saturday. The number of nonfatal crashes tended to be higher on weekdays, peaking on Friday."  Peak time for fatal crashes?  After dark.  Might bar-closing hours have something to do with that?

Perhaps, though, we ought consider the source.  Note Ms. Aronoff's closing comment.  "Mass transit is a public good, and the GOP loves to undermine anything that uses local, state, and federal funds to help average people."  Sorry, no, mass transit is more exclusive and rivalrous than the government's roads, consider, again, those subscription club cars or first-class sections, and all she's done is give the Pachs cause to double down on the road socialism, because it provides those "average people" with single-seat options from home to school or work or to shopping.

So it often is with transit advocates.  If not for the crazies, there wouldn't be many.  Ms Aronoff is a voice of reason compared with "Transportation is a Human Right" out of Buffalo's School of Social Work.

Transportation affects nearly every aspect of our lives. We need a way to get to work or school, buy food and necessities, access medical care, connect with loved ones — the list goes on. Access to safe transportation is recognized as a social determinant of health by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and research shows that unreliable or inadequate transportation creates barriers to accessing employment, housing, fresh food and more.

Simply put, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”

“Without affordable public transportation, our society is more unequal,” says Diane Elze, associate professor emeritus. “Lack of access to transportation exacerbates racial and economic disparities in our country. When we look at the building of highway systems in this country, and how it destroyed Black neighborhoods, we can see that the lack of public transportation is grounded in white supremacy.

“Even more than a social determinant of health, transportation is a human right.”

That's an interesting bundle of points.  Can something that requires the labor of others be a "human right?"  How did the building of urban expressways undo the rapid transit?  And is Professor Elze seriously complaining that preventing fare-evasion somehow is a denial of civil rights?

It gets better.  Perhaps Buffalo's social work faculty ought be taking the regional transit authority to task for leaving money on the table.

More than 56,000 Buffalo households don’t own a vehicle — but 58% of local jobs are beyond the reach of transit networks, according to PPG.

In her research, Associate Professor Kelly Patterson looks at how affordable housing policies affect residents’ access to “valued resources,” including employment and health care, particularly in shrinking cities like Buffalo.

“Many jobs have left urban areas and went out to the periphery or the suburbs, where people cannot easily access them,” she says. This shift creates longer commutes for workers who live in cities, challenges for people who rely on public transit and an increased dependency on cars — all of which puts pressure on transportation systems and affects the environment.

Low-income populations also experience health disparities when they are limited by inadequate transportation and crumbling infrastructure in their own neighborhood.

“Because of poorly maintained roads, uneven sidewalks and broken streetlights, people in poor neighborhoods don’t get the physical activity that many people in suburbs get for free because they can go for a walk or jog at all times of the day,” Patterson says.

Only a government agency, such as a transit authority, will complain about areas of potential demand being "beyond their reach."  No wonder the ride-sharing services do as well as they do.