Transit and the American city

On March 18, 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to rage in New York, and two days after the city shuttered its schools and four days before the city forbade white-collar workers from coming to their offices, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the regional subway, bus, and commuter-rail system, warned investors in its nearly $44 billion in municipal debt: “People may permanently alter their commutation behavior after this crisis.”

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The statement proved prophetic. Three years later, even as American life has mostly returned to normal, with planes and restaurants full, the nation’s mass-transit systems still struggle with double-digit ridership declines. American public transit faces its biggest crisis since city dwellers deserted cramped apartments and sweaty subways for suburban homes and the private car, beginning a century ago. The transit crisis is also an urban crisis. Successful cities thrive on density; transit enables it. Unless Congress, governors, and mayors figure out how to get more people back on trains and buses regularly, the already brittle urban success story of the twenty-first century will crack.

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