Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
September 1, 1995

Cities, if allowed to develop by themselves, directed not by planners and politicians but by the individual decisions of its citizens, both as producers who dream of better ways to serve their fellow residents, and as consumers who seek out the best ways to be served, would tend to increase their densities, perhaps by the 50 per cent that Manhattan has lost: Most people have always gravitated to the excitement of high-density cities, despite the obstacles politicians such as Boss Tweed so often put in their place.

Public transit has never been as deregulated, in any major city anywhere in the world, as it is today in the cities of the United Kingdom. The stage is set for a rematch in the battle between cars and transit, only this time the competitors will be playing by the same rule books: Both will be paying for the use they make of roads, both will be free to compete for the hearts of their customers.

The auto industry will be a tough and unrelenting competitor: The variety available in vehicles is spreading to gas stations, where Mobil Oil has begun providing upscale service for the 80 per cent of drivers who aren’t price shoppers. At some stations, uniformed concierge-attendants rush coffee or cappuccino to waiting drivers; one dealer puts a red carpet, plants and mirrors in his station’s bathroom.

But if the fight is fair, the automobile will lose much of its urban market: When the choice is between juggling a cappuccino in a disposable cup behind the wheel of a car, and leisurely sipping it from china in a VIP car, after a shoulder massage has taken away those aches from the pressures of the day, the direction in which a fully competitive transportation system for cities would take us is clear.

Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
September 1, 1995

Frank also envisions 100-foot-long buses for bikes and motorcycles that would carry 80 passengers and vehicles for his automotive society by the freeway. In this money-is-no-object fantasy world, the planners remain firmly in charge. Despite the success of decentralized systems, and the failure of large-scale, regional planning, their answer is more planning, more comprehensively done.

If transportation and land-use planning are to succeed, the article reports, they “must be conducted regionally with the full participation of local communities. Planners have known that for a quarter of a century, but efforts first to establish and then to strengthen regional bodies with more than specialized authority have proceeded slowly.” Another expert cited by Atlantic Monthly is even more militant on the need for command and control: “We must take control of technology — ‘storm the bridge of the Titanic’ — by setting goals to produce economical, energy-efficient vehicles and then dealing with issues relating to the reasons people drive and, more fundamentally, to the effects of an ever exploding human population on the world’s resources and creatures.”

These articles nowhere consider profitability; they consider — and reject — competition between public transit and the private automobile all within the same paragraph. The new reformers consider public transit as we know it, especially subways and other railed vehicles, an anachronism: “Municipalities have chosen to put their efforts and funds into subways and light-rail commuter trains that with few exceptions can be classed as follies — grand monuments to the power of the public dollar, and to the nostalgia value of trains. . . . Some sixty years ago the automobile surpassed the train as the preferred mode of transportation for Americans, and many transit officials and train buffs will admit off the record that that ranking will probably never change. Even in rail-rich Europe, studies show that in England and France, two countries with extensive urban transit systems, city dwellers prefer to drive or walk, in that order.”

“Mass transit was created to resolve crowding in cities in the late nineteenth century,” says Frank, the buses-for-cars advocate. “In this country, we have constructed a low-density society. Planners are wrong to want to re-create a nineteenth-century society.”

The article then justifies replacing past planning disasters with its brave new world as “no more radical than the one taken nearly forty years ago to create a culture dedicated to the car and linked nationally by a 45,500-mile ribbon of concrete and asphalt.”

It all sounds so desperate, so defeatist despite the rhetoric, and so unnecessary. Rather than blindly go into this technological black hole where the author hopes that somehow “a comprehensive new approach to transportation will give it a more human face,” and where public transit solutions must await the resolving of global population problems, we might pause to examine the nitty-gritty of our public transportation systems in the here and now. Railed vehicles are no less relevant today than in the past, their failings not caused by inherently fatal flaws but by the failure of politicians and planners to see railed system’s role in the transit scheme of things. The creation of the low-density society Frank talks about, caused by policies that depopulated inner cities, should not be worn as a badge of honor but as a stain.

The subway system’s three parts: the stations, the cars and the track

Car companies built automobiles but not roads and gas stations; these separate components of the automobile system, having different ownership, knew where their common interests lay but otherwise more or less went about their own business, allowing each to focus clearly on its particular goals.

London’s bus system, when it broke up under deregulation, similarly divided into its separate operations. The London bus system’s 10 subsidiaries were sold to private operators; the bus stations remained with the transit authority, which began to treat them as a separate business. A third part of the bus system — the roads — is also being rethought on a businesslike basis. Plans are now being developed to charge all vehicles, including cars, for the use of city streets. All U.K. highways, meanwhile, are converting to privately operated toll roads. With these changes, the private automobile will lose an untoward advantage it has had, and competition between public and private transit will be put on a far more even footing.

The next step in the disentangling of the rat’s nest that our public transit systems have become — and the most important one for most large cities — will be restructuring subways, high-speed money machines that have rusted and fallen into disrepair in London, New York, Toronto and many other large cities. Thanks to municipal owners who don’t put customers first, subway systems remain relatively undeveloped, unable to compete vigorously against the car and other forms of surface traffic. By separating subway systems into their component businesses, as the London transit system has done with its buses, and by letting each make its own way, the cost of subway travel will shrink amid a proliferation of new services.

The lowly subway station

In most subway cities, subway stations are appalling places. Often nondescript-looking, they are pricey nevertheless — the TTC estimates the cost of building a station at over $40 million. Mostly located underground, arrived at by stairs or escalator from the sidewalk above, or from an institutional street-level building, subway décor compares to that of public washrooms, the easier to mop down. Subway operators see these stations as engineering necessities to carry high volumes of people underground; stations, in their view, aren’t money-makers but expenses — overhead into which transit operators put as little as they can, because they’ll get nothing out.

To a transit operator, the high flow of pedestrian traffic is a problem to be managed; to a merchant on a busy street, and in the underground shopping complexes of Toronto and other cold cities, the high level of pedestrian traffic is not a problem but an asset.

Early subway station builders recognized street traffic’s value: the Metropolitan and District, a private company that built one of London’s first subways, located its subway entrances inside shopping arcades. Airports have also begun recognizing this value in pedestrian traffic, particularly since London’s Heathrow airport and other U.K. airports were privatized eight years ago. To the surprise of BAA, the new airport company, aggressive retailing (including lowering the price of airport goods to those in the city) so capitalized on airport traffic that BAA now brings in more revenue, and profit, from its various retail operations than from airplanes taking off and landing. Retail’s success also attracts passenger travel: People now choose Heathrow for their connecting flights because of the shopping. BAA, which has become one of the U.K.’s most profitable businesses, benefits another way: It now markets its airport retailing expertise to airports around the world, which are likewise learning to leverage their pedestrian traffic. Airports, as a result, have lost their deadbeat status.

Although some subway stations have limited retail activities, and sometimes even shopping malls, in their operation, the involvement is usually half-hearted: The station is designed for the subway’s convenience, and retail accommodates itself to whatever opportunities remain. Typically, these stores are small, generally below ground, and outside the turnstile.

The world’s subway systems should borrow a page from the subway’s past, and the airport’s present, and turn stations into profit centres by selling the street-level floor space to retailers who would know what to do with the traffic. Some subway locations, say in trendy boutique areas, might suit high-end clothing stores (if Boss Tweed had not stopped New York’s first subway more than a century ago, Devlin’s Clothing Store might have become such a station); others, near entertainment districts, might lend themselves to restaurants and bars, where theatregoers could pass the time before a performance or discuss it afterward. Stations in residential neighborhoods might double as drugstores or supermarkets. Retailers buying stations would be those most likely to benefit from increased traffic, and most likely, also, to promote their customers’ subway use. The retailers’ advertising would flag the subway stop that had become part of their identity. In cities that have extensive downtown underground shopping malls, pedestrian access to the subway would often come from the lower shopping level. In cities that don’t, retailers would create underground shopping malls to profit from commuter traffic.

Because subway stations are built by transit engineers and not mall retailers, subway platforms typically have one or two entrances, often inconveniently located. But with retailers at pedestrian levels providing access, entrances could be located at many points along the length of a subway platform. A busy intersection where subway lines connect might well have 120 or more stores above the subway platforms, 30 on each side of the street from each of the four street corners, 200 feet in each direction. Each of those 120 store owners would weigh the cost of providing an elevator or stair to the subway below against the benefit of the extra pedestrian traffic. With every subway station turned into retail establishments, this once-costly part of the subway system would be a separate, stand-alone operation, no longer a drain on the public purse but a convenience for the passenger and a boon to the retailer.

Subway cars

Automobiles come in various colours, shapes and sizes because people do: Automobile companies try hard to satisfy their customers’ diverse demands. How do the automakers figure out what their customers want? They look.

“We’re asking: What is somebody doing in a vehicle and what do they need?” says Gerald Hirschberg, Nissan’s vice-president of design. The proliferation of automobile accessories attests to the many things drivers do, or try to do, in cars. But despite the proliferation, it is hard to do much behind the wheel of a car. Drivers might try to lengthen their workday by working in fits and starts behind the wheel; they might squeeze in a breakfast of coffee and a muffin, or preen themselves by plugging in an electric shaver or putting on makeup. But autos just don’t have the potential of subway cars. These are, after all, 500-750 square foot structures, the size of small stores, that could be earning as much or more from retail operations as they do from selling their transportation services. Here, then, are some of the different stores-on-wheels that could — and should — be pulling out of our subway stations in the near future, chock-a-block with customers, shopping till their stop.

Kinko’s-On-Wheels — the business car

Someone like Gerald Hirschberg, looking at what people do on subway cars, would see determined souls trying to get some work done: middle managers, briefcase across their knees, scribbling memos to themselves; university students finishing their assignments; people with notebook computers, tapping their keyboards while getting jostled by their neighbors. On street level, stores like Kinko’s provide temporary offices for people on the go, and for the increasing numbers who work out of their home, but don’t have fully equipped offices. Also on street level, for people who want to stay connected to their co-workers and customers, an increasing number of automobiles are equipped with cellular phones and fax machines, even printers; for people making sales calls or operating businesses out of their back seats, some cars have virtually become offices. A Kinko’s-On-Wheels subway car, equipped with flip-down desks, cell phones and stationery, notebook computers and printers, would turn the downtime of travel into productive periods. Because the Kinko’s customer’s stop might come before the work was finished, the platform outside each Kinko’s car would be similarly equipped, and have a photocopier and binder to produce copies needed for a presentation. Kinko’s-On-Wheels would also allow people to clear away their personal chores, like balancing the chequebook and returning phone calls they couldn’t get to during the day. When passenger business tailed off at night, Kinko’s could sublet part of its car space to UPS or other parcel-delivery businesses. Courier businesses, which in subway cities already supplement their road vehicles with subway pickups and deliveries, would find that the advantages of doing so increased once the subway provided direct access to hundreds of stores above subway stations. Courier delivery could lead to shipments of freight and other goods, with secure predawn delivery of periodicals to magazine stores, bread to restaurants, milk to convenience stores — items now often left outside stores on the sidewalk, where they’re subject to theft and the elements.

VIP car

Many luxury car owners are also car renters who prefer to save their own cars for occasions that count. If these high-end car commuters had high-end subway cars to patronize, suitably appointed and serviced, with dependable schedules, many would be there. Their seats — airplane-style recliners — could be reserved by phone, for occasional trips or on an annual basis. Stewards could serve coffee in china cups in the morning, cappuccino for leisurely daytime travelers, and cognac for the ride home. Personalized TV monitors, with earphones so as not to disturb fellow passengers, could broadcast the news, stock quotes or entertainment. VIPs who wanted to get work done could have access to a cellphone, a modem, a laptop computer, a VCR for instructional videos, and a tax-deductible receipt to claim a business expense. When passenger business tailed off at night, the VIP’s platform furnishings could be stowed in the VIP car, which would then be retired for the night and be swapped for an entertainment car.

Standing room only (SRO)

Passengers generally pick subways for their longer public-transit trips — in one study, people who travel less than 10 kilometres make the trip faster on the surface. But many trips are nevertheless short, and for passengers who just want to go a few stops, or for those who prefer to stand after sitting all day, SRO cars will fit the ticket.

Without passengers struggling in and out of rush-hour seating, SRO cars will load and unload quickly. And because they will allow a whopping 285 passengers to stand with plenty of elbow room, SRO fares will run at a discount relative to other cars. Short-trippers will also appreciate the SRO’s pay-by-distance fares, which won’t penalize shoppers and others for hopping from stop to stop.

The smoking car (Lighten up)

About one-third of us still smoke, and to protect the two-thirds of us who don’t from this indoor pollution, most subway systems outlaw smoking. This prohibition drives a large number of customers into their automobiles, where, ironically, exhaust may do nonsmokers as much or more harm. Far better to provide smokers with well-ventilated cars of their own, charcoal-filtered to trap stray smoke before it can get to non-smokers. As with the new cigarette stores sprouting like weeds throughout the U.S. that stock almost every conceivable brand, from Marlboro to Indonesia’s Djarum clove, smoking car patrons would be able to light up in a guilt-free environment, savor their smokes over a morning coffee or while unwinding on their journey home, and pick up a carton or two while they’re at it.

Other specialty cars

Subway cars, along with the platform space outside them, would be owned by different merchants, who would offer their customers whatever seemed likely to make a buck.

In the same way that different parts of town cater to different interests, different subway lines would offer different opportunities to businesses catering to different clienteles. The increasingly competitive airport industry provides cues for the type of service the public wants. Seattle’s Concourse C, for example, provides neck and shoulder massages to fully clothed patrons in its airport lounge: $13 for a 15-minute massage, $22 for a half-hour massage. Subway patrons who like to relax over a drink might prefer a bar car, teens might flock to video arcades on wheels, evangelists might set up shop to save souls in the subway’s depths. Those who just want a comfortable seat would select upholstered seating cars.

Using a “smart card” that knows how much service on each subway car costs, and that is capable of charging on the basis of distance traveled and time of day, fares would be paid on entry in the boarding area. These boarding areas would sell goods and services complementing the subway car’s function — smoking paraphernalia outside the smoking car, Cross pens and caviar as you board the VIP car to go home, French bread and fresh flowers for the dinner table on disembarking everywhere.

Because some merchants would require more space, others less, subway cars would no longer be standardized in length, allowing for a greater number of cars per train, and for different subway lines to have different numbers of cars. But all the trains on a particular subway line would likely continue to resemble each other (the SRO car might always be the third car, the VIP always the last). Like stores in a mall, the position of particular cars on the platform wouldn’t change, and passengers would soon learn where to board the car they were taking that day.

Retailer/operators would own the subway cars. And each subway line would have a different mix of cars, corresponding to the nature of the districts the subway line passed through (VIP cars would only be found along affluent routes, smoking cars might be found along all routes). While one retailer might own all the smoking cars, say, the cars could also be franchised, with different franchisees operating the many smoking cars traveling a line.

Merchants would also boost revenue from subway advertising, which currently fetches a low price because advertisers can’t efficiently target their audience. With specialized subway cars and platform areas catering to very particular clienteles, higher advertising rates would be justified per person reached; with the system attracting more passengers, advertising revenue would increase proportionately. Taken together, advertising revenue would likely double, possibly triple.

Managing the track

To allocate the costs of use and upkeep of the tracks and other equipment, each subway merchant would own a portion of an infrastructure maintenance company in proportion to the length of platform it occupied. The company would be similar to a condominium corporation, where the cost of individual units (cars) is borne by the individual owners, but the cost of the whole building (tracks) is shared. Because the merchants’ livelihoods would depend on the entire system working well, they would have an incentive both to maintain it well and to use it intensively, to spread the track maintenance costs over more subway cars operating at greater frequencies over more hours. We would soon have subway lines that are kept immaculately clean and graffiti-free. Roadbeds would be continually improved to provide quieter, more comfortable rides, particularly when doing so would enable merchants to increase their sales (of drinks that might spill, say). Cost savings would be pursued. For example, only now are some subway systems examining the possibility of generating their own power, a major cost of any subway system. Because subway systems have relatively steady power requirements throughout the day, subway systems especially lend themselves to low-cost power production. The infrastructure maintenance business would also pursue related business opportunities: The tunnel might be able to provide underground rights-of-way to cable or power companies, or sell consulting services to subway systems starting in other cities.

Back to the future

Public transit has always been regulated. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci proposed the first underground thoroughfare — a sunken double-deck roadway to move commercial traffic and unclog Milan’s hopelessly choked roadways. But Milan’s bosses, the Boss Tweeds of their era, thought otherwise and the subway idea languished for centuries. Even prior to the electric age, to protect hackney coachmen from competition, London enforced an ordinance forbidding omnibuses from picking up and dropping off passengers, leading omnibus drivers to chain themselves to their coach seats to prevent their being jailed. When increasing conflicts led to the repeal of this ordinance in 1832, a government licensing system for both drivers and conductors replaced it, legitimizing mass transit in the U.K. for the first time but keeping it under political control. Ever since, the spoils of the public-transit market have gone to those with the most influence at city hall, which has generally created little monopolies for private transit operators, or government bureaucracies for themselves. Competition, where it has occurred at all, has generally been for a company’s right to run a particular concession — to control routes on particular public streets for a limited period of time.

Despite Boss Tweed, New York eventually built subways, private lines that gave it one of the world’s best transit systems. But new Boss Tweeds were always just around the corner, and they tended to prevail. New York’s transit system, which by all rights should be an unparalleled success, is instead dirty and derelict, and a drain on public coffers, as are almost all the subways in the great cities of the world.

Cities, especially when they reach high densities and especially if they were built before this century, lend themselves to pedestrian thoroughfares and they lend themselves to subways. Cities are, by their nature, densely populated places where land values are extraordinarily high because so many people insist on living there. The scarce, expensive land encourages its efficient use: A London or a Paris needs only one-eighth of its land area for roads, half that of a recently built auto-oriented city.

Within high-density cities, there is only one way to move very great numbers of people over short distances with speed and efficiency: by foot. One hundred thousand people could manage the trek from downtown Boston to the Commons, using existing streets, in a half-hour with ease. Give them the benefit of the automobile and a small fraction would complete the journey. Before England had any public transportation, about 50,000 people per hour crossed London Bridge on their way to work. Our best expressways today manage 4,000 to 6,000 cars.

To move very great numbers of people over considerable distances with speed and efficiency takes subways, which can manage 40,000 to 50,000 per hour. Dense cities have no alternative. When cities are less dense, streetcars, with half the capacity of subways but costing much less, become more economical. At lower densities still, the bus makes most sense. The automobile would ordinarily have a limited role to play in dense cities.

Early on, the automobile industry recognized that cities didn’t suit them. General Motors decided it would need to “reorder society…to alter the environment in which automobiles were sold,” Studebaker said that “If we are to have full use of the automobile, cities must be remade.”

Cities were remade, not through the voluntary undistorted choices of its citizens but through political machinations that kept out competition in the public-transit market. Urban densities declined dramatically. Manhattan’s extraordinarily high density of 65,000 people per square mile today was 50 per cent higher — 100,000 — at the turn of the century.

Continue to Part 4

Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
September 1, 1995

The 20th century has been ruled by the automobile; the future belongs to urban transit

In 1912, construction workers tunneling through the earth beneath Broadway to build New York City’s first subway beheld an apparition. There, deep under the city streets, lay an underground station, decorated in Victorian finery, a 22-seat subway car, in mint condition, sitting on its tracks. It was no apparition. The entombed station, completed almost a half century earlier, was the creation of Alfred Ely Beach, an inventor whose vision of an underground railway for Manhattan led him to embark on an undercover operation too outlandish for even Ripley to believe: the secret construction of a subway.

By the 1860s, the streets of New York had become so congested and the drivers of the horse-drawn omnibuses so arrogant that the New York Herald observed: “Modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.” Broadway especially teemed, an omnibus passing City Hall every 15 seconds. But various attempts to alleviate the nightmare were immediately blocked by William Marcy (Boss) Tweed, the notorious emperor of Tammany Hall, the corrupt old boy’s network that controlled New York state politics. The omnibus companies didn’t want competition and with Boss Tweed’s help, plans for a subterranean solution were squelched. This despite the success of London’s first underground, a steam-generated subway built in 1863.

Enter Alfred Beach. The creator of the cable railway, the pneumatic tube, and a hydraulic tunneling bore decided to break the omnibus monopoly by going over Boss Tweed’s head to the people. He rented the basement of Devlin’s Clothing store at Broadway and Murray, carted his tunneling device there, and each night, with his son and a corps of construction workers sworn to secrecy, somehow dug out a tunnel 312 feet long under Broadway, from Warren Street to Murray Street, without anyone noticing. On February 26, 1870, $350,000 of his own money later, Beach invited the press and public officials to the clothing store, where, dumbfounded, they gaped at a 120-foot-long waiting room, complete with a flowing water fountain, grand piano, goldfish tank, and fine art gracing the walls, all illuminated by elegant zircon lamps. The gathering then climbed aboard a car whose fittings put contemporary transportation to shame.

The Herald headline proclaimed: “Fashionable Reception Held in the Bowels of the Earth.” The New York Sun reported that “The waiting room is a large and elegantly furnished apartment, cheerful and attractive throughout.” Beach announced that he would extend the subway north five miles to Central Park, but Boss Tweed vowed the subway would go no farther and he made it stick: The state legislature refused to give the subway a go. The glamorous subway, arrived at through a clothing store’s cellar, closed its doors before it ever had a chance to test the marketplace. Beach’s dream of an elegant, entrepreneurial and economical transit system has been buried under the dross of corruption and government regulation for more than a century, but it is not dead. The 20th century has been ruled by the automobile; the future belongs to urban transit.

How the car became king

Sometimes it seems that the automobile manufacturers are trying to drive us crazy. Sedans, station wagons, convertibles and sports cars weren’t enough. Neither were compacts, subcompacts, and hatchbacks. Suddenly minivans appeared out of nowhere, over 20 competing brands vying for less than a tenth of the market.

But the field is becoming more crowded still. Now sports utility vehicles are coming at us. And they’re going upscale, too — Mercedes-Benz, Lincoln, Lexus and Jaguar are among eight luxury automakers producing utility vehicles, and another half dozen may join them.

Bewilderment at the offerings from the purveyors of fine automobiles doesn’t stop once you’ve settled on the vehicle’s make; that’s when the dazzle begins. Here’s a sampling of the goodies and gizmos stuffed over, under and around us in vehicle showrooms today, often as standard fare.

Want safety? Choose dual airbags, halogen headlights, traction control, all-wheel drive, four-wheel anti-lock disc brakes, side-impact protection, even adaptive transmission control that senses downhill driving and slippery roads, handling them like an expert manual driver. To be secure as well as safe, also choose longer and simpler warranties, and engines that last 150,000 kilometres between tune-ups.

Like music? Try an eight-speaker sound system with CD player, or maybe sound systems that provide your choice of listening environment — jazz club, concert hall, cathedral or rock ‘n’ roll settings. Want to finish hearing that song while you’re gathering up the groceries? Buy an accessory power delay that allows the radio to operate for up to 10 minutes after the ignition’s been switched off.

How about security? Cars come with anti-theft alarms, engine-disabling theft deterrents and remote key-fob transmitters that will unlock doors and turn on interior lights before you reach the car.

Sensitive to the weather? You need a seat warmer — just dial the temperature you want. Your passenger to the right needs a separate climate control, and rear passengers need their own heating and air-conditioning vents. You all need charcoal filters to remove pollen, odor and dust. Soon, you’ll need moisture sensors to roll up your windows when you’re home inside, your car’s parked outside, and it’s raining.

Lost your way? Navigation systems, like Oldsmobile’s Guidestar, use global positioning satellites to guide your car to any location programmed into it. A dashboard monitor tracks your progress on a digital map, and a computer voice gives you driver-friendly instructions like “Stay in the left lane till you pass the McDonald’s.” And there are toll-free information and 24-hour roadside assistance numbers.

The list of offerings goes on and on. Side-mounted mirrors tilt down automatically whenever you shift into reverse (the better to see that you’re not about to run over the groceries you forgot to bring in). To reduce squabbles with your spouse, an adaptive memory function “learns” both of your driving styles, and accordingly adjusts seats, mirrors, temperature and those other irksome differences between you. And if you’re really particular, you can get three overhead passenger grab handles, leather seats with up-down and in-out lumbar support, a separately movable shoulder area on the front and rear seat backrests, work gloves in the spare tire compartment to keep hands clean during a change, a parcel net in the trunk, illuminated doors, dual retractable cup or juice-box holders, rear coat hooks that can be expanded to hold a week’s worth of dry cleaning, and a battery-saver system that shuts off forgotten lights.

Not that long ago, options such as power windows and power steering were considered treats, and automatic transmission or air conditioning was considered luxurious. There was a time — in 1914 — that Henry Ford could decide “a customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black,” and make his decision stick.

Today, interiors and exteriors can come coordinated by designer labels, paints can be custom mixed. Designers care about the feel of window switches, the shape of knobs, the accessibility of cup holders, the opening angle of the glove compartment, the tone and volume of the keyless-entry signal, even the weight of the ignition key. Automakers stop at nothing to try to discern their customers’ wants. They do it partly for love but mostly for money.

It has been this way for the better part of a century. Automakers strive to understand your needs and wants, to pamper, to stroke your ego, to feed your fantasies, to please and to protect, to provide value and extravagance. They have to. If they take their customers for granted, they’ll lose them. About 75 per cent of car customers switch to companies that better figure out what drivers want, whether sensible or silly, and then give it to them. The relentless competition has worked. The market share of the automobile has been climbing steadily over the last century.

Henry Ford, whose any-color-so-long-as-it’s-black Model T dominated the auto industry for 12 years, favored quick-drying black enamel paint because it speeded up his production lines. But his customers had different priorities, which other companies were only too willing to meet. Ford saw red, but kowtowed to the multicolored marketplace.

It didn’t have to work out that way. Had Ford played his cards differently, he might have had the full power of the state behind him, a government-backed monopoly that could force the customer to buy black or not at all. We’d still be driving Model Ts, probably updated every 25 years or so. And many of us would have gotten turned off by the horseless carriages along the way.

But the automobile market wasn’t monopolized, auto use proliferated, and the auto industry has never been more vibrant. The public transit companies were monopolized, however, and they’ve been stumbling ever since, losing customers and market share.

How to stop an industry dead in its tracks

The golden age of the electric transit lasted only a few years. Invented in 1888, trolley systems by 1890 had been ordered by 200 private companies throughout the U.S. In London, 1890 also saw the opening of the world’s first underground electric railway, the first of eight private underground electric railways that soon serviced it. Chicago took the technology above ground with an elevated electric railroad six miles long built for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; by 1897, 15 streetcar companies were plying its roads. That year, Boston opened up North America’s first subway, servicing 50 million passengers — five times the first year’s total of London’s electric underground. Glasgow and Budapest already had electric subways, Paris soon would. In the U.S., General Electric was serving 435 electric railway companies running 8,800 trolley cars along 5,000 miles of track. Los Angeles’ 3,000 vehicles provided service on lines radiating out 75 miles from the city’s centre. By 1900, electric trains dominated urban travel in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. By 1902, a U.S. Street Railway Census showed that investors had poured $2 billion into 22,000 miles of electric railway, carrying five billion passengers a year — seven times the number who rode the steam trains.

Yet the electric railway had its detractors. Some decried the loss of their traditional way of life. Downtown businesses and members of the public feared fires and electrocutions from the hissing overhead trolley lines. Alarmed property owners were convinced the subway tunnels would give way, and their buildings would collapse. But the opposition also resented the colossal wealth amassed by monopoly tycoons, many of whom didn’t shrink from expressing contempt for their customers. William Vanderbilt, when asked by the Chicago Daily News if his railroad would be willing to sustain a loss if the public interest demanded it, replied, “The public be damned!” J.P. Morgan scandalized the nation by stating, “I owe the public nothing.”

Politicians capitalized on public discontent to extract more revenues and commitments from the transit companies. Some, like the Montreal Street Railway Company, paid for half the city’s cost of snow cleaning on its routes plus a share of the fare box receipts. The Toronto Street Railway paid a tax for street paving, and maintained the pavement. Liverpool’s trams paid taxes for the land under the rails. They got off relatively lightly. A Philadelphia trolley line repaved the city’s entire downtown area. In one case, the city took 95 per cent of the fare box. Bribes also became rampant, the cheapest way for private trolley companies to get politicians off their backs.

Politicians also scored points by forcing fares down, and some may have been serving more than the public’s interest. James Couzens, a Detroit mayoralty candidate and passionate advocate of public ownership of transit systems, provoked a riot when he got himself pushed off a streetcar by a frustrated conductor who refused to take his nickel after a fare increase to six cents. Couzens, Henry Ford’s partner and vice-president of the Ford Motor Company, became mayor, and then relentlessly campaigned against the Detroit Urban Railroad until it was forced to sell out. Montreal’s city council resorted to publicity campaigns to shame the Montreal Tramways Company into building unprofitable lines to serve new districts, outside the company’s agreed-on service.

Around the time of the First World War, the Toronto Street Railway, also under pressure to provide unprofitable service, tried to escape the political machinations, and struck a deal with the city’s mayor to sell out for whatever an independent arbitrator thought fair. But city council overruled the deal, knowing it could pick up the railway for less by destroying its value. Although wartime inflation in wages and materials was forcing the Toronto Street Railway’s balance sheet to bleed red ink, although fare increases to cover inflation were being allowed in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal and various U.S. cities, Toronto city council refused to allow fare increases throughout the war and beyond. City council’s strategy succeeded. In 1921, the near-bankrupt company sold out. The city immediately raised fares 50 per cent to bring them into line with those of other jurisdictions.

This once-golden industry was having its goose cooked. And soon there would be no more golden eggs. Electric railways, identified with big-business interests, earned little public sympathy. Turning today’s logic on its head, at the time transit was seen as a private business and the automobile — an individually owned and operated alternative to the hated private rail monopolies — as a public good.

Politicians could dictate terms to the transit companies because transit investments were captive — after sinking fortunes into power plants and other infrastructure, transit operations couldn’t very well move their subway tunnels, tear down their trolley wires, pick up their track and go. But the transit companies could stop playing that game, and did. It would lead to the first great collapse of a North American industry.

By 1905, just two years after Henry Ford started his company and before the auto, which was then viewed as a toy for the rich, was seen as a competitor, the smart money realized that politics would doom the transit industry. Although that year investment would peak, investors who could see the writing on the wall began to flee. By 1910, new capital investment in public transit was down almost 75 per cent, below the level of 1890, when the industry was just gearing up. By 1915, investment had dropped by 95 per cent, and by 1920 the investor panic was in full-force — the industry was disinvesting, letting itself run down. Disinvestment continued unabated for the next generation. Investors never came back.

The automobile had become a formidable competitor. While only one person in 10,000 owned a car at the turn of the century, by 1920 it had become widely accessible and avidly sought: By 1930, there would be one car on the road for every five people (or just about one per family).

Despite the flight of capital, despite the automobile’s phenomenal popularity, demand for public transit kept growing, and as long as systems weren’t too ramshackle, the trains kept rolling. For most passengers, trolleys were a pleasant meeting place as well as a conveyance, where passengers would chat while enjoying the scenery. Through 1900, Sunday had been the heaviest day of patronage; through the 1920s, Saturday. Unlike many of today’s transit systems, which primarily serve rush-hour peaks and little else, the transit business then catered to a varied clientele, selling holiday and excursion fares, serving midday shoppers, providing group travel for outings and commuter services for daily passengers to and from work. London’s subways, catering to all, from aristocrats to common blokes, sold first-class, second-class, and ordinary (third-class) tickets. Utilitarian trolleys carried the mail and other freight, handsome black and silver hearse trolleys carried the dead.

The electric railways had class, too, many being exquisitely appointed. Exteriors were prided on being “lavish in the extreme,” with up to 15 coats of paint producing a high-gloss finish to complement the fancy scrollwork and gilt lettering. Interiors might have window curtains of Russian leather trimmed with silk, solid mahogany door frames, carved seat panels and ceilings depicting landscapes. Stylish streetcars evoked a spirit that sustained them.

Despite the automobile’s inroads, 17 billion passengers still rode subways and streetcars in the late 1920s — an all-time high apart from the Second World War, when public transit use soared with gasoline rationing and civilian vehicle production commandeered for the military. The public wanted both public transit and the private automobile, and had these giants of the road and rail been free to duke it out in a knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out fight, a healthy balance would have resulted.

But the competition between the automobile and the railed vehicles was anything but healthy. While the auto companies paid nothing for the government’s massive roadbuilding program, transit companies not only had to build their own roads but also to pay governments for the privilege. While auto companies had the freedom to price their products to suit the marketplace, transit companies were stuck with regulators who told them how much to charge, where they could travel and how many employees to hire per streetcar (two — a conductor and a motorman).

With these shackles, the industry became demoralized and derelict, and easy prey for the aggressive marketing of the automobile industry, which promoted glamorous coast-to-coast auto races and capitalized on celebrities’ use of the automobile.

“It’s not fair to your children — your wife — or yourself” to ride the trolleys, a Willys-Overland ad in the Ladies’ Home Journal lectured, showing downcast parents and their children boarding a drab, crowded streetcar while on the page opposite a smiling family rode in one of its spanking new open touring cars. Public transit was “wrong,” admonished the ad, they should join “the new order of things” and buy a car.

An industry that once had status slowly became a pariah.

From the New Deal to the Great Society

Despite their uphill battle, most street railway companies hung on, even into the Depression, when commuting plunged, often because they were owned by electricity conglomerates with deep pockets. The U.S. federal government, under a populist new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his transportation czar, Joseph Eastman, inadvertently put an end to that. Scoffing at Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that unerringly guided the economy, Eastman, a minister’s son, worshipped “the guiding hand of government control.” New Deal policies soon broke up the electricity conglomerates by forcing them to sell off their transit businesses. Suddenly dozens of streetcar companies glutted the market, virtually all of them in precarious financial straits and highly vulnerable to takeovers.

Even prior to the government creation of this buyer’s market in trains, a group surreptitiously backed by Standard Oil, Firestone Tires, and General Motors, which had by then overtaken Ford as the leading auto manufacturer, was busily buying streetcar franchises. Once bought, the systems were scrapped in favor of GM buses using Firestone tires and fueled by Standard Oil. Among the first was New York’s streetcar network, the world’s largest, which was converted in the space of just 18 months. The $100-million Los Angeles Railway in 1943 was one of the last — 19 of its 25 lines had their tracks torn up, their transmission lines ripped down. By 1949, when the three companies were convicted in Chicago Federal Court of having criminally conspired to replace electric trolleys with gasoline and diesel-fueled buses, in violation of antitrust laws, over 100 systems in 45 U.S. cities had been dismantled.

Buses, which carry fewer people and require more maintenance than electric vehicles, often weren’t up to the job, especially in cities where transit operations had become marginal at best. The difficulty of getting in and out of traffic quickly gave the sluggish diesel an average rush-hour speed of close to 12 miles per hour, or less than the streetcar’s before the turn of the century. The diesel’s noise (30 decibels, or 1,000 times louder than the electric vehicle) and smell (more complaints are registered each year over the diesel exhaust than over any other pollutant) also discouraged passengers. Between 1955 and 1973, over 500 bus companies abandoned operations, leaving many cities with no transportation alternative to the automobile. Remaining companies sputtered along, barely profitable, moving people who, for the most part, had few alternatives.

By 1964, only 61 urban U.S. bus systems with revenues over $1 million each remained. But only 10 were government-operated. Passenger fares still covered 98 cents of every dollar of operating costs plus depreciation, about the same as in 1950. At that point, with concern high over the decimation of America’s inner cities, the architects of the Great Society decided to help out with an infusion of capital from Washington. Replace the aging fleets that were turning off riders, they believed, and customers would flock back.

But a situation that had more or less stabilized by 1965 began to spiral down after Washington’s involvement. The shiny new transit systems, bought with someone else’s money, weren’t proving cheaper to operate. Productivity plummeted, costs soared and private lines started to bail out.

When the federal government in 1975 added operating subsidies to its capital grants, the picture got worse. Transit systems no longer had to scrounge fares from scruffy passengers to survive; fare boxes were in the federal government’s hands, and it was stuffing them with wads of money, making it the systems’ most important customer. Passengers became neglected in record numbers. Easy money also encouraged management and labor inefficiencies along with pay and benefit hikes, especially in larger, transit-dependent cities, where strikes are most dreaded. In all, between 1965 and 1985, the cost of operating a bus (factoring out inflation) nearly doubled. By 1975, riders were covering only 50 cents on the dollar, and by 1985, just 34 cents.

While costs were climbing, service became shoddier: Public transit commuters were spending more time traveling shorter distances, just the opposite of automobile commuters. By 1990, the average car commute of only 10.6 miles was taking roughly 20 minutes, while the average transit commute of 12.6 miles took 50 minutes — an extra hour a day, every day, for the round trip.

Continue to Part 2