When I visited Atlanta some years ago I had an easy time getting around on MARTA—but hardly anyone was using it. There was a cultural view of mass transit as something for the poor and vaguely unsafe. (It was a perfectly nice system.)
Haha, so true. During a visit from Toronto to Atlanta in Dec 2019 we stopped in at a local bar for a refreshment after visiting the botanic gardens to see the holiday lights. It was a delightful little place. We made friends immediately & after a coupla few drinks, asked the barkeep for our bill as we had to catch our bus to head back downtown. And looking at us as if we were from Mars, she asked why were we taking the bus? To which we replied, why not? It’s fast & efficient and it’ll get us to the subway lickety split. But she, and all our new friends in the bar were simply astonished that we would even be using public transportation as many of them never had. It was for us, a twilight zone moment in that no one in that bar — especially and admittedly, white folk — would use their perfectly good transit system. It just seemed so completely odd to us as we had been using it without incident the whole time we were there. 🎶 Cue the Twilight Zone music 🎶
What gets me is the steadfast refusal of so many people to even try something different. I travel mostly in Europe, and when there almost exclusively via train, light rail or bus. When talking to fellow Americans I find incredulity as the response to descriptions of my experiences and assessments (cheaper, faster, safer, more environmentally responsible, more relaxing, more entertaining.) The closed mindedness is astounding.
Not only the intercities. The regional and local networks are efficient and tightly integrated. For example, from my customary hotel in Berlin, Hamburg, München or Düsseldorf I can walk one block to the S- or U-bahn station and purchase a single ticket which takes me to the Hauptbahnhof then to another city and then via S- or U-bahn to close to my destination. Similarly in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris or Vienna, among others.
This system exists because the people demand it and are willing to pay for it.
Exactly. The train arrives at the station and there are other trains, buses, trams, taxis, even boats/ferries, waiting for you to continue your journey. In the Netherlands each train station also has a lot of space to park bicycles. When I lived there I bicycled and walked a lot. Used public transportation a lot. Our Metro in Amsterdam is an amazing feat of engineering. I loved to use that too.
SS: "...cheaper, faster, safer, more environmentally responsible, more relaxing, more entertaining."
And totally "un-American." Here, we embrace more expensive, slower, less safe, more polluting, more stressful, and absolutely mindnumbingly boring.
"America, the greatest country on Earth!" We've done this to ourselves, just as we inflicted Trump and fascism on ourselves. With friends like ourselves, Americans don't need enemies.
Road sign: Complete catastrophe ahead! Stop!
American Passenger to driver: Speed up, let's take a closer look!
I lived in Chicago when I was a young married and drove almost everywhere, for the reasons you mentioned, but mostly because we had to take along a car seat, baby items, etc., hard to do when walking 4 or more blocks to the El.
Most stories here are about people going to their job or some other destination. You are one of the few who mentions the logistics of doing trips with a child/children, and all which that entails.
I deleted my comment as apparently it offended. What happened was I overestimated the local transportation system. The trip took several hours by car, train, walking, EL, more walking, another EL, again walking. I had expected to go now and then a day to the city and was disappointed when I realized that is not doable - and there is also the trip back. I overestimated how much I can still take at my age. Maybe I should have mentioned that - I am not as fast as I was.
I also overestimated the ability of some posters here to recognize a tongue-in-cheek comment. One even blocked me because of it.
At least one was rather rude to you, too. I wanted to report that,as it offended me,but I can't do it on my phone. Assuming you are a senior, I suggest checking whether your local transit company has paratransit, which will take you door to door if you qualify. The price is inexpensive.
City bus is conflated with bussing. Bussing is desegregation. The federal judges ordered bussing and became enemies of the lily white citizens. They are taking down The Feds. The recent ascendency of the Ku Klux Klan, whose motto is America First, leaves you few choices in any US community. May I recommend drinking and worshipping with the Unitarian-Universalists?
"City bus is conflated with bussing. Bussing is desegregation."
----
Do people really conflate modern city buses with school buses from over 50 years ago?
People raised in car-centric areas (like suburban kids) don't generally get exposed to mass transit until—and if—they go to colleges where the student culture takes it for granted. For young people, cars represent freedom and independence available any time of the day or night, where the company, conversation and smells are yours to control. You have control of the hygiene level and the sound system. Women don't have to worry about being groped by strangers, and parents don't have to worry about children interacting with strangers.
I can only draw on my experience growing up in Jacksonville FL and living here off and on as an adult. After. Court-ordered bussing for public schools many new private high schools were built, all with "Christian" in their name. "Christian" came to mean "Segregationist." Just like bus and bussing means desegregation. We can't unlearn these lessons.
I'm with Pope Leo and I ride city buses, but then I don't identify as a Christian.
"Christian" schools were often a workaround for public (government) schools prohibiting the promotion of religion. (Kids can pray in public schools, but teachers can't teach supernatural beliefs, like gods and afterlife.)
Christian schools were at first mostly high schools where Southern Baptist men could be certain their daughters would not mix with Black students in the newly desegregated public schools. But I'm certain they told their children they were enrolled in Christian schools so that they could pray.
Busses in many places are slow. Often it takes three or four times longer to take the bus.
Sacramento used to have a wonderful express bus system that people took from the outlying areas into the downtown. Then they built the light rail system. The rail system didn't go out very far. So to justify the rail, they forced everyone to take the bus, then transfer to the light rail to get to the downtown. Everyone's commute doubled.
I am not surprised that white people gasped when you said you would ride the bus. In my Southern town some decades ago as I grew up, the bus was tacitly considered a vehicle for Black folks, especially maids, to get to and from work. While our bus system has evolved, it is not efficient nor effective, running infrequently. I have never used it, though when I lived elsewhere and when I visit big cities, I typically have preferred buses as a way to see sights while getting where I wanted to go.
I have a friend from Bakersfield CA who would fit right in with the Atlanta crowd. I met her and a friend in Manhattan. I was staying in the Y across from Central Park because it's about half the cost of other places and close to where my daughter was going to school. I could walk to recitals in less than ten minutes.
I used the subway all the time. It was easy once I figured out uptown and downtown. My friend wouldn't go on the subway. It was too scary.
What was the frequency of that bus? Low frequency in cities like Atlanta often kill public transportation. My general rule of thumb is that if you need a schedule, you probably need more vehicle frequency .
I lived in metro Atlanta for 32 years. Using MARTA is not easy from the burbs. By the time I drove to a station or bus, I might as well have driven all the way in. Now I live north of Seattle where a 3 minute walk gets me to a bus that will get me to the light rail to take into town. World of difference.
My girlfriend and I just visited Seattle and, hell yeah, it’s simple to get around on public transit. We had a rental car. But for our day trips into town, taking the Rapid Ride was a game changer. We did need a car because the visit also included a trip to the Pacific Coast. But aside from using the car to get daily provisions and for a short trip up to Edmonds, we really didn’t need it in town.
I live in Edmonds. They extended the light rail out to the neighboring town about a year ago. I can take a 20 minute bus ride from outside my door to the light rail to go into Seattle or right to the airport. Very easy!
I’m proud to say my granddaughter works for the city as a transportation specialist. She got a masters degree in urban planning with a focus on transportation. Examined transportation systems in European cities to learn how they do things. And they were anxious to have her and she loves her job. And she’s very proud of the way it works in Seattle. Still things to work on of course but overall it’s a wonderful thing.
I moved here right after the MLT and Lynnwood stations opened. Community Transit ran little "field trips" for seniors to learn how to take the bus to the rail into the city. It was great to have an orientation to the system. We took bus to rail to ferry last week to go to Bainbridge Island. No worries about traffic or parking. It's great!
What a cool job that must be. I lived in Asia in my high school and college days, and have thought about going to get a master's in that field (also from WA). What's her opinion on potential center running bus lanes on Highway 99? I appreciated those as much as the subway in Seoul.
I’ll ask! And if I can find this thread again I’ll tell you. She’s so busy though and she’s 28, getting her to respond to grandma is not always easy. She’s also taking care of her dad who’s ill so a lot on her plate but she’s an unbelievable young woman.
And we Seattleites turned down a federal rapid transit system in the seventies so the money went to Atlanta.
How is that for stupid!
Not to be topped though, Paul Allen wanted to donate his south lake union property for a grand city Central Park and brilliant seattle voters turned that down too.
It’s not just MAGA that are self defeating nutcases.
Seattle might have transplanted Oregon people. Oregon is the only state where it was simply illegal to be Black, until the state constitution was amended in 1927.
The last time I visited Seattle, I flew into SeaTac. I didn't rent a car for my stay in Seattle. I had taken the initiative of getting a senior ORCA card and I used transit for my entire stay in the city. I started with light rail from SeaTac to downtown, where I got on a a bus to my hotel. The rest of my stay I got around the city via a combination of bus and light rail. With the senior ORCA card I didn't need to carry bus fare and only paid $2 per day for transit since I know how the transfer system works. Yes, there were places I visited where I did have to walk a few blocks, particularly in Ballard. Seattle's transit system, while good is not perfect. When I was ready to leave the city to visit other parts of western Washington, I took the express bus up to shoreline where I picked up a rental car, then drove to Edmonds and got on the ferry to the peninsula.
It has gotten a bit better with the suburban Xpress buses. But, yeah, MARTA isn't much more than a remote parking lot for many suburban trips. Worst traffic is on from the perimeter north.
For non-Atlantans, it's on I-85, I-75 and GA400 north of I-285 on the north side of town, and I-285 that connects them.
A 30 mile trip can take 45 minutes to an hour and a half...any time of day. You always have to leave the 90 minutes travel time.
Yeah it is very largely a cultural issue in the south. Being able to drive everywhere is considered an inalienable right of man. Public transportation and multi-family homes are for losers. I live south of Atlanta but I am from CT so I have seen populations with different attitudes toward public transportation and housing.
My guess is that Atlanta will indeed contract some more as Mr. Krugman suggests. The traffic is so dismal that it becomes impossible to maneuver around the city so it can’t keep growing.
I wondered in anyone would bring that up about MARTA. I first heard it when I moved to ATL in the 80's. The white suburbs FEARED mass transit. They are more integrated now. I wonder if newcomers still hear that slur.
In 2004 my well-heeled urban Jacksonville neighbors, all white, went to a city-wide transit hearing to demand that the city bus stop in my neighborhood be removed because it attracted riff-raff. <whew> Today I walk a little farther to catch a bus, but I've walked with my smallest rolling luggage and ridden to the city bus hub then boarded a bus to the JAX airport, flown to ATL, used my MARTA card to ride the to end of the line, boarded a city bus to Alpharetta where I enjoyed a memorable breakfast near that bus stop. I've made similar treks to Washington DC and Charlotte NC and other cities. I'm delighted I won't run into my bigoted, mostly MAGA neighbors when I use public transit.
Anecdotal, but when I visited Atlanta in 2024 and got around exclusively on MARTA I was basically the only white person on every train.
One of my college friends grew up in one of the white suburbs and was rather crestfallen when they voted against funding an extension because it would bring "those people" into the neighborhood.
It's an interesting case study why DC succeeded where Atlanta failed. I suspect it's because a LOT of white federal workers take Metro in from the suburbs, thus negating the negative stereotypes (while essentially acting as a subsidy to help fund upkeep). Atlanta doesn't seem to have had that: white suburbanites just kept on driving to their cushy downtown jobs and MARTA has slowly atrophied without the support of wealthy suburbanites.
Isn't it also the case in the Bay Area? Lots of horror stories about BART, which may or may not be true. I've ridden it a few times and had no issues but there is a sense of isolation that you don't feel on a New York or London subway ride. Which gets back to the notion of density.
The issue in large part with Great Society metros (WAMATA gets a small pass due to NE VA) is that waiting for a train in the center of an 8 lane freeway is incredibly unpleasant, and also that nothing but parking lots await you at 90% of non-downtown stations. Even if it has the name of a town on it, getting dropped off a 10 minute car ride away from the town center makes it nigh unusable as a primary source of transportation. Also complicates densifying the parking lots since living next to a freeway is also pretty terrible.
Some of this is also the transit subsidy given to federal workers in downtown DC. Even white suburbanites take the train because there simply isn't enough parking and it's much easier than driving!
In CA we are still in love with cars. To avoid having to park, I decided to take the train three stops to my destination, after a 10 min drive to the train station. I was proud of myself, learning to use public transportation in my own country! I have lovedthe public transportation in Europe, Japan, etc. Easy and pleasant, here as well.
I lived in Fresno, CA, which borders Clovis, CA. Both cities had public transportation. But because the funding came from different sources they were not allowed to make one schedule for the whole area.
Like many places in the south. Limits on water and roads and everything else with more people coming every day. Florida may be about to contract too because suddenly insurance is unaffordable.
It was deliberately built to serve the poor (mostly black) areas. Surrounding areas, like Marietta, also successfully prevented extension of the system into their turf because they didn't want their areas to be easily accessed by black people. Glad to hear you liked it; I helped build parts of it.
Of course, when the city closed down all the public housing projects, the poor were displaced & no longer able to live near the transit system. Basically the city's attack on affordable housing became an unintentional attack on public transit.
Take note that this desire to prevent Black people coming on public transit is also why Georgetown residents blocked a Metro station being placed there.
Exactly the situation with the Los Angeles Metro Rail system (L.A. "subways"), where the overwhelming patronage is anchored by low-to-moderate-income service workers heading for and leaving daily jobs. And as one can imagine, the riders are largely Hispani , while gringos jump into their cars and endure the tortuous grinds on the often-choked freeways, as old habits and poorly-served office parks offer no alternatives.
L.A. defined sprawl, and the Metro system too limited and too late to ameliorate the damage.
As a transit planner I’m quite familiar with the history of MARTA. At the time, post LBJ 1964 Urban mass transit act the BART and DC metro systems were planned and built to cover their respective metropolitan areas. All while yes it was a good part of the opposition was bigotry (Heather McGee’s filled in pool metaphor is fitting) “Why can’t I just get in my car?” As well as fledgling political support from the state and county governments. MARTA was limited to within Atlanta proper, hence the crude acronyms for it. If the system had been built out into Cobb county economic growth would have followed the line along with density. Many of younger Gen Z as well as seniors of previous generations are more that fine with residing in townhouses and apartments in denser walkable communities.
I assisted with writing the successful UMTA grant for the Jacksonville, Florida People Mover. When the funds arrived the City Council changed the project name to Skyway, fired all the government planners who worked on the grant, and hired a local architecture and engineering firm to design a new system. There's more immediate graft in hefty design fees to a private firm than in waiting years for land assemblage and construction. I'm glad you had a better experience.
Cobb certainly has grown. But density along transit didn't really emerge as a strategy in Atlanta until the 2000s and although the BeltLine is a selling point for new construction, most people drive to it to use it.
I lived in north Cobb County. There were no buses within walking distance to get to MARTA......even walking a mile, 2 miles. I am in a Seattle suburb now. There are 3 bus routes i could walk to that would take me to light rail. A robust bus system makes a big difference.
The limitations of sprawl, Atlanta-style, also reflect the limitations of bigotry.
The lack of public transportation is also a way of limiting transportation for the poor, colorful and immigrant communities.
In New York City, you are not afraid to rub shoulders with diversity. When you embrace difference, the sky becomes your limit.
When you are afraid of difference, erecting fences and imposing traffic for your commute, you don't just keep people out of your daily experience, you simultaneously close doors of opportunity and set a ceiling on your potential.
Sorry to inject contemporary politics into your discourse, but it is true.
Who could forget Braves’ pitcher John Rocker’s comments about the 7 Train and New York:
“Rocker told Sports Illustrated he would retire before ever playing for a New York team and then added:
‘Imagine having to take the (No.) 7 train to (Shea Stadium) looking like you're (in) Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing.
‘The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners," the 25-year-old Georgia native said. "You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?’
When Johnny Racist “pitched” (using the term loosely here) for the (then) Cleveland Indians he had the skills to give up a homer to the Blue Jays. On his way to the showers, I heckled him and called him a “shit kickin’ hick”. I was applauded. He was released not long after that game.
Yes. It was back around the beginning of the millennium, and while it may seem like "old news" it's completely relevant today.
I brought it up because at the time, the remarks were shocking and got the pitcher in a great deal of trouble, including with MLB. He retracted those remarks and then did a whole "Can't wait to ride the 7 train."
Now, we hear this kind of trash from the president of the US, his admin, and his devoted community of MAGA followers. Hating immigrants and "others" is no longer a bad thing; it's their reason for being.
Bigotry affects public transportation even in the dense northeast US, where white middle-class suburbanites are able to commute downtown in commuter trains while working-class POC who work in suburbs are expected to make do with buses.
The objection I heard years ago when I was in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta was that a train might make it easier to get into Atlanta, but it would also make it possible for the people of color in Atlanta find their way to Marietta.
It was clear those in Marietta were willing to pay the price of hour-long commutes to keep it that way.
And yes, definitely, the South does not have a monopoly on bigotry. It is an American trait, not a regional one.
In Los Angeles, the Metro expansion into Century City in West Los Angeles was delayed for decades, because Beverly Hills fought tooth and nail against the opening of a station in their neighborhood. It’s not hard to guess why.
Which means all of the Century City workers who could be taking metro are forced to sit in traffic for hours instead. Our office just moved from downtown to there and the Century City Metro station doesn’t open until 2026. I am putting up with driving for now and paying over $300 per month to park in the building. Cannot wait for the lovely Metro to open next year. If it doesn’t, I may lose my mind.
As an urban planner who researched and wrote about Atlanta, it is a fascinating city to study. Your quote is quite funny: “two cutting-edge transportation technologies. One of them is this thing called a “train,” sometimes running underground. The other is something called an “elevator,” which allows many people to live in multistory, multifamily apartment buildings.”
I am not a fan of cities that abuse human scale, personally, why I love DC (before Trump/MAGA f’d it up and stole their tax revenue). But mass transit provides a myriad of solutions and is always shunted due to upfront costs. Solutions abound, we just are led by cowards and NIMBYs with too much money.
My urban planning experience is limited to SimCity. But in the game, at some point, you have to destroy the early game single family homes and replace them with more efficient multiple stories residential buildings. However, this seems harder to do in real life.
When I see 8+ stories buildings everywhere in Manhattan, I can help but wonder what happened to the previous buildings...
They disappeared, mostly. It’s a continuing process — both in Manhattan and the other boroughs.
A lot of it was a result of the building and expansion of the subways in the first half of the 20th century; much of the rest a combination of the destruction by “urban renewal” and the refocusing upon the value of real estate in the 1980s.
Interesting, but it's important to highlight that car dependant sprawl is not the result of free-market forces, but the consequences of misguided regulation which promotes car dependency. It's an incredibly inefficient design (which may be a mystery to future archaeologists) which leads to all sorts of negative externalties. Pollution and congestion are the most obvious, but the public health impacts of enforced sedentary lifestyles are enermous. I'll wager that there's a vast amount of wasted space in the Atlanta sprawl which could be used to accommodate higher density development, where people could access amenities on foot rather than cars.
People do look healthier in dense cities (in my experience NYC, Berlin, Munich) than in most places in the US. Even in smaller cities in Europe folks look thinner (does anyone have data?). I believe its the walking required in a dense city to go “the last km”.
During Covid, I transitioned to working from home most days, and driving into the office on the other days. It's remarkable how much of a difference it made no longer having my "ten minutes from home to the metro, ten minutes from the metro to work, ten minutes from work to the metro, ten minutes from the metro to home" walking made to my fitness.
I think the main reason that cities are healthier than suburbs is because people who are too sick to walk a mile have trouble living in them and move out.
I live in Edmonds, WA and there are always people walking. We have those funny oddities called sidewalks here. Prior, I lived in Knoxville for a few years and I had to get in a car to leave my subdivision because there wasn't even a decent shoulder to walk along the main road. I grew up with sidewalks in NJ and I am loving the walkability I have now. A lot of newer development in the south left out sidewalks that connect places.
You might call it wasted space, but in fact a lot of it is GREEN space, with creeks running through it. I have lived in the Atlanta metro area for 30+ years, and watched a lot of the growth happen. The current folks yelling about urban density are mostly developers who want to cut down all the trees, skim the profit, and walk away leaving us to choke on exhaust fumes til we die. Maybe being hit by a frustrated driver desperately trying to turn left. Atlanta has its origins in the railways, and its first growth was streetcar oriented. Sadly, car-oriented development policies coupled with racism wiped out the streetcars. I live in a perimeter city on the southwest edge of Atlanta now, having abandoned my intown neighborhood after traffic killed my husband. I am watching the insatiable "transit-oriented development" and "urban density infill development" swallow huge tracts of what used to be industrial land, as well as gobbling entire neighborhoods of former streetcar suburbs. Arguably replacing defunct factories with "mixed use development" is a good thing. Destroying historic neighborhoods, along with the tree cover that helps ameliorate summer heat, is beyond short-sighted, however. And we've yet to see ANY transit infrastructure improvement at all so far.
Isn't "greenspace" also not mostly wasted, as its purpose is to separate people from car traffic rather than to be a space for people to enjoy (like parks or gardens)?
We may have a different understanding of the term. I mean greenspace to include parks and gardens. Trees are important for shade and to mitigate the urban island heat effect, surface water flooding and other benefits.
In Southern California the streetcars died because they were built following an unsustainable business model: they were loss leaders used to help sell real estate, so once all the real estate was sold they decayed into ruin.
I never heard that before. But it makes sense. I lived in Fresno and was surprised by old pictures showing streetcars. When lived in Milwaukee (early 2000's) the city tried to reintroduce some streetcars. But it was too expensive, the experiment was stopped and the "trolley-cars" were auctioned off.
NYC is energy efficient from apartments to transportation. There might be only one or two apartment walls exposed to the outdoors losing energy, and all others shared with similar temperatures. Mass transit is also efficient, due mostly to the number of riders, but also faster progress on rails or dedicated lanes.
But I do want to point out what I have always considered a blessing for downtrodden Southern Black people. Many moved north after extreme bigotry and the blessing is that their spirits brought them north to cooler climates to survive global warming heat waves of this future. God helped Blacks to think of escaping evil to find safe haven in the north. I myself am thinking of spending my last years in Canada. The insanity of existence in America is just too illogical to want to remain.
There is a view colder climates promotes more efficient working. Lee Kuen Yew, the autocrat who transformed Singapore, insisted all government offices had air conditioning to promote productivity. Indeed colder countries tend to be wealthier than hotter countries in the industrial age, although it may be coincidental.
Very much a historical accident. For a particularly ugly case on point Exhibit A: Russia.
But certainly in hotter climes the summer heat makes the midday hours kinda impossible to do much in without technological intervention, hence such traditions as the siesta and just doing more in the cooler parts of the day.
Well Russia is a bit unique in many ways. But yes, Yew claimed air conditioning was the one invention which made modern development possible in the tropics. I imagine running a factory 24 hrs a day would require constant cooling.
I mean at that point you're already looking at full electric lighting and more likely than not more or less extensive cooling for the machinery anyway. Aircon to keep the workers from keeling over from heatstroke is a somewhat trivial addition. (Curio aside - you know the "sawtooth" roofs of classic factory imagery? Those are skylights for added free illumination during the daylight hours, which was when most factories operated anyway.)
As for Russia, well, their industrialisation started out with binding serfs to manufactories instead of fields cuz that's how the place rolled back then. 🤷
Also Finland was a backwater agrarian net exporter of labour until about the early 1970s... and that was *with* the boost given by the weird but quite lucrative bilateral trade with the USSR that began with the war reparations.
Agreed. But is AC an option all-over (also in other countries) with the temperatures rising because of climate change? We will need a lot of green energy.
The amount of energy used by AC is trivial compared to that used by cars, planes or gas central heating, plus the need for AC is highest in hot sunny weather when solar power works well.
Thank you. Well put. God is in the Wilderness among all the creatures. In 1975, working in a machine shop on Long Island, as I monitored the automation, I read two books about how to build a log cabin and I sketched a design for a drop-in-a-stream water wheel generator for power. Back then I understood one could homestead for land in Canada and I was preparing to go, albeit slowly, until the boss gave me a new job in R&D. Since then I had several good jobs but crime took it's toll on me and my family. I have regretted not going since then. But it would be nice to end my years meditating in the wilderness with God and his people and creatures, where wilderness blesses you.
Any part of rural Canada would please you, I think. But I strongly suggest the Maritimes -- the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and, if you're very adventurous, Newfoundland. So beautiful. Quaint villages. Small but cosmopolitan cities. And easily the friendliest people in a pretty friendly country. (Stay away from Alberta though... Just about anybody would give you the same advice.)
On what type of visa would you be able to immigrate into Canada? Do you have dual citizenship, do you have close family there or did you get a job offer? (Just asking.)
Please study Canadian immigration rules before making this statement. You can "love to have somebody" but the question is, does your government too? (I lived for a while in your country and would have loved to stay - but I got ill.)
I live on the Atlanta Beltline in a condo. I walk to do most activities and put fewer than 2000 miles on my car last year. My gentrified neighborhood is pricey. The city has substantial multi family buildings being built and occupied. In town we are very blue.
The suburbs are a different animal than my neighborhood and rural GA seems a lost cause to disinformation.
Sadly even in my progressive area people are fighting light rail on the Beltline saying we cannot afford it. Glug!
I’m at the Rome airport returning to ATL after a month in Italy. The trains are great. Italy managed to build track and tunnels.
On migration out of GA. Until recently we enjoyed large film production projects. That industry has collapsed. I was a production sound mixer. Our tax incentives are no longer enough to keep shoots in GA.
Munich, Germany was also really well designed when it was rebuilt and became one of the most livable cities. The key was the absolutely fantastic, clean, and on-time subway system. I could go on and on about it, but bottom line is that you can get anywhere in Munich and its suburbs much faster than by car. And an app tells you EXACTLY when you’ll reach your destination from where you are!
The limits of sprawl were examined over 50 years ago in models about LA and then Houston, and the conclusion was that around 1 hr for a commute was generally the limit. Of course, people will drive more if they really need a job, and we all hear about people commuting over 2 hrs. My point is that for all of the US, the technology of transport has been frozen in a model developed over 50 years ago, and the only way to break out of it is to allow for greater density, zoning that does not require fixed ratios of parking per dwelling unit, and to maximize public transport. LA has been slow in changing, but it has added rail and increased density, as there is no way to increase net car traffic flow. In my dreams, all systems in the US would have positive train control system for safety and efficiency -- New York and Boston are in the process of installing them. Also, in my dreams, Boston would electrify all its commuter trains, which would allow for increased frequency of service. If we in the US were truly wise about transport, we would understand that everywhere in major cities, automobile traffic moves now at about 10 to 12 mph overall, and the only way to break free of this is a robust grid of public transit. Improvements are needed in circumferential transport, rather than what we have in most cities, which is radial from the city center. NY has, for example, been considering a route from Brooklyn to Queens on an existing right-of-way, and we need much more of that. Finally, we need to rethink transport in the last mile, which could be bicycle or even Musks fever dream of an autonomous taxi.
The last mile is critical. My spouse and I bought a house next to an end-of-the-line DC Metro Station in 1990 (before we retired, we were both Feds -- he at the FDA and I at the Smithsonian -- yes, it is sad). It took 25 years for the MD suburb to install a sidewalk, allowing us to walk less than a mile to the Metro Stop. Ridiculous.
The key to increasing mass transit use is to concentrate as many jobs as possible in a small downtown area: Calgary did this and thus has the third-highest mode share for transit in North America after New York and San Francisco, even though it is a right-wing city dominated by the oil industry (and thus also Canada's climate change denial capital) where almost all of the residential areas are low-density sprawl.
Los Angeles is the opposite extreme: while the city's overall population density is high by North American standards, there are no strong concentrations of jobs, and thus public transit is little used except by people too poor to afford cars.
Los Angeles's history as a boom town in the early 20th century (first from Hollywood and then from the industry that sprang up to support the war effort against Japan) didn't help either: boom towns tend to become very car-oriented as their residents have high disposable income (and thus can easily afford cars) while the city hasn't had time to build decent transit infrastructure.
The challenge is to graft or overlay new transit to cope with the redevelopment and densification (sorry about the word) that occurs in time in places like LA and inevitably in a place like Atlanta. We see that process also happening in Boston, where big projects are built (and not enough of them) in areas where transit is lacking and the roads can't keep up (as in Watertown, Everett, Newton along I-95). What the public seems to not understand is that new major roads can't be built, and even if the existing ones are widened (as for the 405 in LA), the offramps go into city streets that remain congested, so we need to accept the reality that better mass transit is obligatory, with hard decision to make regarding bus lanes and and light rail. We need people to realize that when car-based transportation is at the tipping point of congestion-related failure, every car not on the road becomes a major benefit to all. People decry bicycles, but they carry the great efficiency, which benefits all, especially if bike lanes can be constructed without removing traffic lanes. People have decried the idea of removing fares, but if that gets people away from cars, especially for critically congested routes (as for the 111 line bus route in Boston from Chelsea), it again is of major benefit.
That CBTC and at least half size platform screen doors aren't standard on American metros prove just how backward we are. Also, cancelling the commuter rail tunnel in the Big Dig was such a mistake...
I lived in Atlanta 20 years and recently went back and drove quite a bit. The traffic, and miles and miles of it, absolutely suck. Why did I ever put up with losing so much of my life driving?
I once stayed at hotel in far Northeast suburban Atlanta. I had to cajole the front desk clerk to get a van ride to the closest MARTA stop. The only reason they went there, was to pick up the housekeeping staff. That’s the kind of attitude there about mass transit. It’s only for the poor. I also would like to add, there’s only one Amtrak train serving this huge city, and they haven’t had a passenger train running North or South since 1979! Kind of ridiculous!
My cousin lives in Atlanta. He needs to use “Waze” to decide how and where he will go buy his quart of milk. That is how bad the traffic is ! He is basically trapped in his house.
Could we mimic the Tokyo formula and drive down housing costs? My hunch is no. Americans treat housing as an investment and any policy that drives down housing costs, cheapens that "investment." That's what makes NIMBY such a powerful force.
Described in the most basic way, land is absurdly valuable but houses themselves depreciate. As such they are redeveloped on a small lot basis every 30-40 years, keeping the relative price for renters acceptable since more housing can be constructed easily. This policy came about in large part due to earthquake standards, but if I recall urban land speculation is also illegal, so valuable plots don't sit empty in the hopes value continues to rise - people need to live there now.
Why do housing prices depreciate? I don’t if it true or not but I read that Japanese don’t like used cars. Maybe they don’t like used houses either? Or are earthquakes so bad that houses don’t last?
Homes and land are valued and sold separately, I think. And yes, people do tend to be suspicious of used houses, because a lot of them would be fairly primitive compared to a new one, lacking things that most Americans take for granted, like central heating...
As a resident of Alpharetta (a northern suburb of Atlanta "represented" by a freedom caucus adjacent Rich McCormick) I have to disagree with you. Democrats did not win a single statewide contest in the Ossoff vs. idiot election. We owe our two Dem senators to Herschel Walker being so obviously unqualified even many Republicans couldn't vote for him. There are areas that are turning more blue, like Marietta, but North Fulton is staunchly red, largely due to the people living in the many mega house subdivisions here. Georgia is not a purple state because of our Democrat senators. And so far all the Republicans running against Ossoff are proudly maga. The seat is in serious jeopardy.
In 2020, Jon Ossoff beat incumbent Republican US Senator David Purdue in a runoff. In that same runoff which concluded January 5, 2021, Raphael Warnock beat the other incumbent Republican US Senator Kelly Loeffler who had been appointed to the seat vacated by Johnny Isakson. Warnock held on to that seat in 2022 when he defeated Herschel Walker in a runoff. All were hard fought campaigns. There were no easy wins in GA regardless of the candidates, and Democratic votes state wide, not just those in deep blue Fulton and DeKalb counties helped deliver the US Senate for the Democrats (you are welcome, America). This historic win was overshadowed by the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Perdue now serves as ambassador to China; Loeffler heads the US Small Business Administration. Both are Trump appointees.
“ It is possible for big cities to get it right. America could, for example, learn a lot from Tokyo. But I don’t expect to see that happening any time soon.”
Perhaps too many Americans have reached the Limits of Learning.
Where's the Census data on this? Why is Paul forced to use the Wayback Machine for it. The administration is disappearing many useful Federal data sets, paid for by tax dollars, to keep the public blind. This is wrong! It's Outrageous!
When I visited Atlanta some years ago I had an easy time getting around on MARTA—but hardly anyone was using it. There was a cultural view of mass transit as something for the poor and vaguely unsafe. (It was a perfectly nice system.)
Haha, so true. During a visit from Toronto to Atlanta in Dec 2019 we stopped in at a local bar for a refreshment after visiting the botanic gardens to see the holiday lights. It was a delightful little place. We made friends immediately & after a coupla few drinks, asked the barkeep for our bill as we had to catch our bus to head back downtown. And looking at us as if we were from Mars, she asked why were we taking the bus? To which we replied, why not? It’s fast & efficient and it’ll get us to the subway lickety split. But she, and all our new friends in the bar were simply astonished that we would even be using public transportation as many of them never had. It was for us, a twilight zone moment in that no one in that bar — especially and admittedly, white folk — would use their perfectly good transit system. It just seemed so completely odd to us as we had been using it without incident the whole time we were there. 🎶 Cue the Twilight Zone music 🎶
What gets me is the steadfast refusal of so many people to even try something different. I travel mostly in Europe, and when there almost exclusively via train, light rail or bus. When talking to fellow Americans I find incredulity as the response to descriptions of my experiences and assessments (cheaper, faster, safer, more environmentally responsible, more relaxing, more entertaining.) The closed mindedness is astounding.
Oh those intercity fast rail systems in Europe are fantastic.
Not only the intercities. The regional and local networks are efficient and tightly integrated. For example, from my customary hotel in Berlin, Hamburg, München or Düsseldorf I can walk one block to the S- or U-bahn station and purchase a single ticket which takes me to the Hauptbahnhof then to another city and then via S- or U-bahn to close to my destination. Similarly in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris or Vienna, among others.
This system exists because the people demand it and are willing to pay for it.
Exactly. The train arrives at the station and there are other trains, buses, trams, taxis, even boats/ferries, waiting for you to continue your journey. In the Netherlands each train station also has a lot of space to park bicycles. When I lived there I bicycled and walked a lot. Used public transportation a lot. Our Metro in Amsterdam is an amazing feat of engineering. I loved to use that too.
The stuff you eat right now has something in it they are hiding from you and loads of people are doing this........
sfood1.trackdok.com
spam reported
SS: "...cheaper, faster, safer, more environmentally responsible, more relaxing, more entertaining."
And totally "un-American." Here, we embrace more expensive, slower, less safe, more polluting, more stressful, and absolutely mindnumbingly boring.
"America, the greatest country on Earth!" We've done this to ourselves, just as we inflicted Trump and fascism on ourselves. With friends like ourselves, Americans don't need enemies.
Road sign: Complete catastrophe ahead! Stop!
American Passenger to driver: Speed up, let's take a closer look!
American Driver: You read my mind!
Actually, I don't get your idea except sulky complaining part. And the exaggeration reduces your comment to fantasy verging on the dishonest.
No you didn’t. You said you exaggerated. You did not disclose where your trip originated. You wrote in the second person.
I lived in Chicago when I was a young married and drove almost everywhere, for the reasons you mentioned, but mostly because we had to take along a car seat, baby items, etc., hard to do when walking 4 or more blocks to the El.
Most stories here are about people going to their job or some other destination. You are one of the few who mentions the logistics of doing trips with a child/children, and all which that entails.
I deleted my comment as apparently it offended. What happened was I overestimated the local transportation system. The trip took several hours by car, train, walking, EL, more walking, another EL, again walking. I had expected to go now and then a day to the city and was disappointed when I realized that is not doable - and there is also the trip back. I overestimated how much I can still take at my age. Maybe I should have mentioned that - I am not as fast as I was.
I also overestimated the ability of some posters here to recognize a tongue-in-cheek comment. One even blocked me because of it.
At least one was rather rude to you, too. I wanted to report that,as it offended me,but I can't do it on my phone. Assuming you are a senior, I suggest checking whether your local transit company has paratransit, which will take you door to door if you qualify. The price is inexpensive.
City bus is conflated with bussing. Bussing is desegregation. The federal judges ordered bussing and became enemies of the lily white citizens. They are taking down The Feds. The recent ascendency of the Ku Klux Klan, whose motto is America First, leaves you few choices in any US community. May I recommend drinking and worshipping with the Unitarian-Universalists?
"City bus is conflated with bussing. Bussing is desegregation."
----
Do people really conflate modern city buses with school buses from over 50 years ago?
People raised in car-centric areas (like suburban kids) don't generally get exposed to mass transit until—and if—they go to colleges where the student culture takes it for granted. For young people, cars represent freedom and independence available any time of the day or night, where the company, conversation and smells are yours to control. You have control of the hygiene level and the sound system. Women don't have to worry about being groped by strangers, and parents don't have to worry about children interacting with strangers.
I can only draw on my experience growing up in Jacksonville FL and living here off and on as an adult. After. Court-ordered bussing for public schools many new private high schools were built, all with "Christian" in their name. "Christian" came to mean "Segregationist." Just like bus and bussing means desegregation. We can't unlearn these lessons.
I'm with Pope Leo and I ride city buses, but then I don't identify as a Christian.
"Christian" schools were often a workaround for public (government) schools prohibiting the promotion of religion. (Kids can pray in public schools, but teachers can't teach supernatural beliefs, like gods and afterlife.)
Christian schools were at first mostly high schools where Southern Baptist men could be certain their daughters would not mix with Black students in the newly desegregated public schools. But I'm certain they told their children they were enrolled in Christian schools so that they could pray.
Busses in many places are slow. Often it takes three or four times longer to take the bus.
Sacramento used to have a wonderful express bus system that people took from the outlying areas into the downtown. Then they built the light rail system. The rail system didn't go out very far. So to justify the rail, they forced everyone to take the bus, then transfer to the light rail to get to the downtown. Everyone's commute doubled.
I am not surprised that white people gasped when you said you would ride the bus. In my Southern town some decades ago as I grew up, the bus was tacitly considered a vehicle for Black folks, especially maids, to get to and from work. While our bus system has evolved, it is not efficient nor effective, running infrequently. I have never used it, though when I lived elsewhere and when I visit big cities, I typically have preferred buses as a way to see sights while getting where I wanted to go.
I have a friend from Bakersfield CA who would fit right in with the Atlanta crowd. I met her and a friend in Manhattan. I was staying in the Y across from Central Park because it's about half the cost of other places and close to where my daughter was going to school. I could walk to recitals in less than ten minutes.
I used the subway all the time. It was easy once I figured out uptown and downtown. My friend wouldn't go on the subway. It was too scary.
Public transportation is as good as non-existent in her part of CA.
What was the frequency of that bus? Low frequency in cities like Atlanta often kill public transportation. My general rule of thumb is that if you need a schedule, you probably need more vehicle frequency .
I lived in metro Atlanta for 32 years. Using MARTA is not easy from the burbs. By the time I drove to a station or bus, I might as well have driven all the way in. Now I live north of Seattle where a 3 minute walk gets me to a bus that will get me to the light rail to take into town. World of difference.
My girlfriend and I just visited Seattle and, hell yeah, it’s simple to get around on public transit. We had a rental car. But for our day trips into town, taking the Rapid Ride was a game changer. We did need a car because the visit also included a trip to the Pacific Coast. But aside from using the car to get daily provisions and for a short trip up to Edmonds, we really didn’t need it in town.
I live in Edmonds. They extended the light rail out to the neighboring town about a year ago. I can take a 20 minute bus ride from outside my door to the light rail to go into Seattle or right to the airport. Very easy!
I’m proud to say my granddaughter works for the city as a transportation specialist. She got a masters degree in urban planning with a focus on transportation. Examined transportation systems in European cities to learn how they do things. And they were anxious to have her and she loves her job. And she’s very proud of the way it works in Seattle. Still things to work on of course but overall it’s a wonderful thing.
I moved here right after the MLT and Lynnwood stations opened. Community Transit ran little "field trips" for seniors to learn how to take the bus to the rail into the city. It was great to have an orientation to the system. We took bus to rail to ferry last week to go to Bainbridge Island. No worries about traffic or parking. It's great!
What a cool job that must be. I lived in Asia in my high school and college days, and have thought about going to get a master's in that field (also from WA). What's her opinion on potential center running bus lanes on Highway 99? I appreciated those as much as the subway in Seoul.
I’ll ask! And if I can find this thread again I’ll tell you. She’s so busy though and she’s 28, getting her to respond to grandma is not always easy. She’s also taking care of her dad who’s ill so a lot on her plate but she’s an unbelievable young woman.
And we Seattleites turned down a federal rapid transit system in the seventies so the money went to Atlanta.
How is that for stupid!
Not to be topped though, Paul Allen wanted to donate his south lake union property for a grand city Central Park and brilliant seattle voters turned that down too.
It’s not just MAGA that are self defeating nutcases.
Then Mr. Allen gobbled up more land and in the end it gave Seattle Amazon HQ.
Seattle might have transplanted Oregon people. Oregon is the only state where it was simply illegal to be Black, until the state constitution was amended in 1927.
The last time I visited Seattle, I flew into SeaTac. I didn't rent a car for my stay in Seattle. I had taken the initiative of getting a senior ORCA card and I used transit for my entire stay in the city. I started with light rail from SeaTac to downtown, where I got on a a bus to my hotel. The rest of my stay I got around the city via a combination of bus and light rail. With the senior ORCA card I didn't need to carry bus fare and only paid $2 per day for transit since I know how the transfer system works. Yes, there were places I visited where I did have to walk a few blocks, particularly in Ballard. Seattle's transit system, while good is not perfect. When I was ready to leave the city to visit other parts of western Washington, I took the express bus up to shoreline where I picked up a rental car, then drove to Edmonds and got on the ferry to the peninsula.
It has gotten a bit better with the suburban Xpress buses. But, yeah, MARTA isn't much more than a remote parking lot for many suburban trips. Worst traffic is on from the perimeter north.
For non-Atlantans, it's on I-85, I-75 and GA400 north of I-285 on the north side of town, and I-285 that connects them.
A 30 mile trip can take 45 minutes to an hour and a half...any time of day. You always have to leave the 90 minutes travel time.
Yeah it is very largely a cultural issue in the south. Being able to drive everywhere is considered an inalienable right of man. Public transportation and multi-family homes are for losers. I live south of Atlanta but I am from CT so I have seen populations with different attitudes toward public transportation and housing.
My guess is that Atlanta will indeed contract some more as Mr. Krugman suggests. The traffic is so dismal that it becomes impossible to maneuver around the city so it can’t keep growing.
And that culture is likely bound up with racism: note the alternative expansion of MARTA as "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta".
Exactly my experience re any reference to MARTA; ditto for their aversion to multi-family housing.
I wondered in anyone would bring that up about MARTA. I first heard it when I moved to ATL in the 80's. The white suburbs FEARED mass transit. They are more integrated now. I wonder if newcomers still hear that slur.
In 2004 my well-heeled urban Jacksonville neighbors, all white, went to a city-wide transit hearing to demand that the city bus stop in my neighborhood be removed because it attracted riff-raff. <whew> Today I walk a little farther to catch a bus, but I've walked with my smallest rolling luggage and ridden to the city bus hub then boarded a bus to the JAX airport, flown to ATL, used my MARTA card to ride the to end of the line, boarded a city bus to Alpharetta where I enjoyed a memorable breakfast near that bus stop. I've made similar treks to Washington DC and Charlotte NC and other cities. I'm delighted I won't run into my bigoted, mostly MAGA neighbors when I use public transit.
Anecdotal, but when I visited Atlanta in 2024 and got around exclusively on MARTA I was basically the only white person on every train.
One of my college friends grew up in one of the white suburbs and was rather crestfallen when they voted against funding an extension because it would bring "those people" into the neighborhood.
It's an interesting case study why DC succeeded where Atlanta failed. I suspect it's because a LOT of white federal workers take Metro in from the suburbs, thus negating the negative stereotypes (while essentially acting as a subsidy to help fund upkeep). Atlanta doesn't seem to have had that: white suburbanites just kept on driving to their cushy downtown jobs and MARTA has slowly atrophied without the support of wealthy suburbanites.
Isn't it also the case in the Bay Area? Lots of horror stories about BART, which may or may not be true. I've ridden it a few times and had no issues but there is a sense of isolation that you don't feel on a New York or London subway ride. Which gets back to the notion of density.
The issue in large part with Great Society metros (WAMATA gets a small pass due to NE VA) is that waiting for a train in the center of an 8 lane freeway is incredibly unpleasant, and also that nothing but parking lots await you at 90% of non-downtown stations. Even if it has the name of a town on it, getting dropped off a 10 minute car ride away from the town center makes it nigh unusable as a primary source of transportation. Also complicates densifying the parking lots since living next to a freeway is also pretty terrible.
Some of this is also the transit subsidy given to federal workers in downtown DC. Even white suburbanites take the train because there simply isn't enough parking and it's much easier than driving!
yeah, BART is still pretty limited. originally, the plan was for it to go all the way around the bay but we currently have caltrain on the peninsula.
they are expanding BART so it'll get better but it won't be the unified system that more people will take.
In CA we are still in love with cars. To avoid having to park, I decided to take the train three stops to my destination, after a 10 min drive to the train station. I was proud of myself, learning to use public transportation in my own country! I have lovedthe public transportation in Europe, Japan, etc. Easy and pleasant, here as well.
I lived in Fresno, CA, which borders Clovis, CA. Both cities had public transportation. But because the funding came from different sources they were not allowed to make one schedule for the whole area.
Pitiful, isn’t it.
I knew of a Texas raised doctor's wife in Boston who lived on Beacon Hill and would drive down the Hill about 6 blocks. We laughed but were appalled.
Like many places in the south. Limits on water and roads and everything else with more people coming every day. Florida may be about to contract too because suddenly insurance is unaffordable.
All true. But we have been joking since 1980 that Atlanta has been under “reconstruction” since Sherman’s March to the Sea.
It was deliberately built to serve the poor (mostly black) areas. Surrounding areas, like Marietta, also successfully prevented extension of the system into their turf because they didn't want their areas to be easily accessed by black people. Glad to hear you liked it; I helped build parts of it.
Of course, when the city closed down all the public housing projects, the poor were displaced & no longer able to live near the transit system. Basically the city's attack on affordable housing became an unintentional attack on public transit.
yeah we have a fancy town by me and they forced their train station to close so "others" couldn't easily access it.
Hence the joke that MARTA stands for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta."
That joke was old before they were even thinking about a subway.
Take note that this desire to prevent Black people coming on public transit is also why Georgetown residents blocked a Metro station being placed there.
Exactly the situation with the Los Angeles Metro Rail system (L.A. "subways"), where the overwhelming patronage is anchored by low-to-moderate-income service workers heading for and leaving daily jobs. And as one can imagine, the riders are largely Hispani , while gringos jump into their cars and endure the tortuous grinds on the often-choked freeways, as old habits and poorly-served office parks offer no alternatives.
L.A. defined sprawl, and the Metro system too limited and too late to ameliorate the damage.
As a transit planner I’m quite familiar with the history of MARTA. At the time, post LBJ 1964 Urban mass transit act the BART and DC metro systems were planned and built to cover their respective metropolitan areas. All while yes it was a good part of the opposition was bigotry (Heather McGee’s filled in pool metaphor is fitting) “Why can’t I just get in my car?” As well as fledgling political support from the state and county governments. MARTA was limited to within Atlanta proper, hence the crude acronyms for it. If the system had been built out into Cobb county economic growth would have followed the line along with density. Many of younger Gen Z as well as seniors of previous generations are more that fine with residing in townhouses and apartments in denser walkable communities.
I assisted with writing the successful UMTA grant for the Jacksonville, Florida People Mover. When the funds arrived the City Council changed the project name to Skyway, fired all the government planners who worked on the grant, and hired a local architecture and engineering firm to design a new system. There's more immediate graft in hefty design fees to a private firm than in waiting years for land assemblage and construction. I'm glad you had a better experience.
Cobb certainly has grown. But density along transit didn't really emerge as a strategy in Atlanta until the 2000s and although the BeltLine is a selling point for new construction, most people drive to it to use it.
I lived in north Cobb County. There were no buses within walking distance to get to MARTA......even walking a mile, 2 miles. I am in a Seattle suburb now. There are 3 bus routes i could walk to that would take me to light rail. A robust bus system makes a big difference.
Such clarity in writing. I had no interest in this particular city. I just got hooked by the seduction of storytelling.
The limitations of sprawl, Atlanta-style, also reflect the limitations of bigotry.
The lack of public transportation is also a way of limiting transportation for the poor, colorful and immigrant communities.
In New York City, you are not afraid to rub shoulders with diversity. When you embrace difference, the sky becomes your limit.
When you are afraid of difference, erecting fences and imposing traffic for your commute, you don't just keep people out of your daily experience, you simultaneously close doors of opportunity and set a ceiling on your potential.
Sorry to inject contemporary politics into your discourse, but it is true.
Who could forget Braves’ pitcher John Rocker’s comments about the 7 Train and New York:
“Rocker told Sports Illustrated he would retire before ever playing for a New York team and then added:
‘Imagine having to take the (No.) 7 train to (Shea Stadium) looking like you're (in) Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing.
‘The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners," the 25-year-old Georgia native said. "You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?’
Rocker then retracted those remarks.”
When Johnny Racist “pitched” (using the term loosely here) for the (then) Cleveland Indians he had the skills to give up a homer to the Blue Jays. On his way to the showers, I heckled him and called him a “shit kickin’ hick”. I was applauded. He was released not long after that game.
Wow. When was this?
I’m going to say at least 20 years ago. I got the tickets from my job, at the time.
Yes. It was back around the beginning of the millennium, and while it may seem like "old news" it's completely relevant today.
I brought it up because at the time, the remarks were shocking and got the pitcher in a great deal of trouble, including with MLB. He retracted those remarks and then did a whole "Can't wait to ride the 7 train."
Now, we hear this kind of trash from the president of the US, his admin, and his devoted community of MAGA followers. Hating immigrants and "others" is no longer a bad thing; it's their reason for being.
Bigotry affects public transportation even in the dense northeast US, where white middle-class suburbanites are able to commute downtown in commuter trains while working-class POC who work in suburbs are expected to make do with buses.
The objection I heard years ago when I was in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta was that a train might make it easier to get into Atlanta, but it would also make it possible for the people of color in Atlanta find their way to Marietta.
It was clear those in Marietta were willing to pay the price of hour-long commutes to keep it that way.
And yes, definitely, the South does not have a monopoly on bigotry. It is an American trait, not a regional one.
This was absolutely the fear. I lived in Cobb County.
In Los Angeles, the Metro expansion into Century City in West Los Angeles was delayed for decades, because Beverly Hills fought tooth and nail against the opening of a station in their neighborhood. It’s not hard to guess why.
Which means all of the Century City workers who could be taking metro are forced to sit in traffic for hours instead. Our office just moved from downtown to there and the Century City Metro station doesn’t open until 2026. I am putting up with driving for now and paying over $300 per month to park in the building. Cannot wait for the lovely Metro to open next year. If it doesn’t, I may lose my mind.
As I understand it the opposition mainly came from the school district.
As an urban planner who researched and wrote about Atlanta, it is a fascinating city to study. Your quote is quite funny: “two cutting-edge transportation technologies. One of them is this thing called a “train,” sometimes running underground. The other is something called an “elevator,” which allows many people to live in multistory, multifamily apartment buildings.”
If you read the excellent Red Hot City (https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/in-his-new-book-gsu-professor-dan-immergluck-explores-the-highly-racialized-gentrification-that-changed-atlanta/ ) and then compare to the original masters thesis written to cajole city leaders to think differently about revitalizing by Ryan Gravel, it is easy to see how it was co-opted. There is a direct link to why the “city in a forest”, as a recent cabbie lovingly called Atlanta, has ended up where it is. There are many lessons to be learned.
I am not a fan of cities that abuse human scale, personally, why I love DC (before Trump/MAGA f’d it up and stole their tax revenue). But mass transit provides a myriad of solutions and is always shunted due to upfront costs. Solutions abound, we just are led by cowards and NIMBYs with too much money.
My urban planning experience is limited to SimCity. But in the game, at some point, you have to destroy the early game single family homes and replace them with more efficient multiple stories residential buildings. However, this seems harder to do in real life.
When I see 8+ stories buildings everywhere in Manhattan, I can help but wonder what happened to the previous buildings...
They disappeared, mostly. It’s a continuing process — both in Manhattan and the other boroughs.
A lot of it was a result of the building and expansion of the subways in the first half of the 20th century; much of the rest a combination of the destruction by “urban renewal” and the refocusing upon the value of real estate in the 1980s.
This is what's happening in Nashville.
Interesting, but it's important to highlight that car dependant sprawl is not the result of free-market forces, but the consequences of misguided regulation which promotes car dependency. It's an incredibly inefficient design (which may be a mystery to future archaeologists) which leads to all sorts of negative externalties. Pollution and congestion are the most obvious, but the public health impacts of enforced sedentary lifestyles are enermous. I'll wager that there's a vast amount of wasted space in the Atlanta sprawl which could be used to accommodate higher density development, where people could access amenities on foot rather than cars.
People do look healthier in dense cities (in my experience NYC, Berlin, Munich) than in most places in the US. Even in smaller cities in Europe folks look thinner (does anyone have data?). I believe its the walking required in a dense city to go “the last km”.
Add to that drive meals ... fast food low in nutrients, high in fat, salt and sugar.
It is.
During Covid, I transitioned to working from home most days, and driving into the office on the other days. It's remarkable how much of a difference it made no longer having my "ten minutes from home to the metro, ten minutes from the metro to work, ten minutes from work to the metro, ten minutes from the metro to home" walking made to my fitness.
I think the main reason that cities are healthier than suburbs is because people who are too sick to walk a mile have trouble living in them and move out.
In the Netherlands it is all the bicycling. That mode of transportation will get you anywhere - within a reasonable distance.
I live in Edmonds, WA and there are always people walking. We have those funny oddities called sidewalks here. Prior, I lived in Knoxville for a few years and I had to get in a car to leave my subdivision because there wasn't even a decent shoulder to walk along the main road. I grew up with sidewalks in NJ and I am loving the walkability I have now. A lot of newer development in the south left out sidewalks that connect places.
You might call it wasted space, but in fact a lot of it is GREEN space, with creeks running through it. I have lived in the Atlanta metro area for 30+ years, and watched a lot of the growth happen. The current folks yelling about urban density are mostly developers who want to cut down all the trees, skim the profit, and walk away leaving us to choke on exhaust fumes til we die. Maybe being hit by a frustrated driver desperately trying to turn left. Atlanta has its origins in the railways, and its first growth was streetcar oriented. Sadly, car-oriented development policies coupled with racism wiped out the streetcars. I live in a perimeter city on the southwest edge of Atlanta now, having abandoned my intown neighborhood after traffic killed my husband. I am watching the insatiable "transit-oriented development" and "urban density infill development" swallow huge tracts of what used to be industrial land, as well as gobbling entire neighborhoods of former streetcar suburbs. Arguably replacing defunct factories with "mixed use development" is a good thing. Destroying historic neighborhoods, along with the tree cover that helps ameliorate summer heat, is beyond short-sighted, however. And we've yet to see ANY transit infrastructure improvement at all so far.
By wasted space I mean car parks and big intersections ('greybelt') not greenspace and historic neighborhoods which are indeed important.
Isn't "greenspace" also not mostly wasted, as its purpose is to separate people from car traffic rather than to be a space for people to enjoy (like parks or gardens)?
We may have a different understanding of the term. I mean greenspace to include parks and gardens. Trees are important for shade and to mitigate the urban island heat effect, surface water flooding and other benefits.
I was going off how Nathan Lewis defined "green space" in https://newworldeconomics.com/place-and-non-place/ .
In Southern California the streetcars died because they were built following an unsustainable business model: they were loss leaders used to help sell real estate, so once all the real estate was sold they decayed into ruin.
Was the same true in Atlanta?
I thought a lot was closed down by the car companies?
And it was precisely because their business model was no longer viable that the car companies were able to buy them up.
The story I heard was it was an active conspiracy to destroy public transport to force people to drive cars.
More here. Apparently there were many other factors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
I heard that too but I don’t know if it’s true.
I never heard that before. But it makes sense. I lived in Fresno and was surprised by old pictures showing streetcars. When lived in Milwaukee (early 2000's) the city tried to reintroduce some streetcars. But it was too expensive, the experiment was stopped and the "trolley-cars" were auctioned off.
NYC is energy efficient from apartments to transportation. There might be only one or two apartment walls exposed to the outdoors losing energy, and all others shared with similar temperatures. Mass transit is also efficient, due mostly to the number of riders, but also faster progress on rails or dedicated lanes.
But I do want to point out what I have always considered a blessing for downtrodden Southern Black people. Many moved north after extreme bigotry and the blessing is that their spirits brought them north to cooler climates to survive global warming heat waves of this future. God helped Blacks to think of escaping evil to find safe haven in the north. I myself am thinking of spending my last years in Canada. The insanity of existence in America is just too illogical to want to remain.
There is a view colder climates promotes more efficient working. Lee Kuen Yew, the autocrat who transformed Singapore, insisted all government offices had air conditioning to promote productivity. Indeed colder countries tend to be wealthier than hotter countries in the industrial age, although it may be coincidental.
Very much a historical accident. For a particularly ugly case on point Exhibit A: Russia.
But certainly in hotter climes the summer heat makes the midday hours kinda impossible to do much in without technological intervention, hence such traditions as the siesta and just doing more in the cooler parts of the day.
Well Russia is a bit unique in many ways. But yes, Yew claimed air conditioning was the one invention which made modern development possible in the tropics. I imagine running a factory 24 hrs a day would require constant cooling.
I mean at that point you're already looking at full electric lighting and more likely than not more or less extensive cooling for the machinery anyway. Aircon to keep the workers from keeling over from heatstroke is a somewhat trivial addition. (Curio aside - you know the "sawtooth" roofs of classic factory imagery? Those are skylights for added free illumination during the daylight hours, which was when most factories operated anyway.)
As for Russia, well, their industrialisation started out with binding serfs to manufactories instead of fields cuz that's how the place rolled back then. 🤷
Also Finland was a backwater agrarian net exporter of labour until about the early 1970s... and that was *with* the boost given by the weird but quite lucrative bilateral trade with the USSR that began with the war reparations.
Willis Carrier, the 'father' of modern air conditioning, is an unsung hero. The modern South could not exist without him.
Agreed. But is AC an option all-over (also in other countries) with the temperatures rising because of climate change? We will need a lot of green energy.
The amount of energy used by AC is trivial compared to that used by cars, planes or gas central heating, plus the need for AC is highest in hot sunny weather when solar power works well.
Singapore is on the equator, I believe. No wonder they like air conditioning.
Please come to Canada.
We'd love to have you here!
Uh? My heart sings, "Oh, Canada". You really just thrilled me. Thank you.
Just find your way here, my friend.
Have you thought where you'd like to go?
A big city? A small town?
Quebec is like living in Europe.
The Maritimes remain a dream world of rural life as it used to be...
Thank you. Well put. God is in the Wilderness among all the creatures. In 1975, working in a machine shop on Long Island, as I monitored the automation, I read two books about how to build a log cabin and I sketched a design for a drop-in-a-stream water wheel generator for power. Back then I understood one could homestead for land in Canada and I was preparing to go, albeit slowly, until the boss gave me a new job in R&D. Since then I had several good jobs but crime took it's toll on me and my family. I have regretted not going since then. But it would be nice to end my years meditating in the wilderness with God and his people and creatures, where wilderness blesses you.
Any part of rural Canada would please you, I think. But I strongly suggest the Maritimes -- the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and, if you're very adventurous, Newfoundland. So beautiful. Quaint villages. Small but cosmopolitan cities. And easily the friendliest people in a pretty friendly country. (Stay away from Alberta though... Just about anybody would give you the same advice.)
Thank you Michael. Yes, Alberta, oil. unfortunate.
Yes. My daughter lives in Alberta and isn’t happy with their politics. BC resident here.
On what type of visa would you be able to immigrate into Canada? Do you have dual citizenship, do you have close family there or did you get a job offer? (Just asking.)
But not if you're retired. Alas. You didn't have jobs up there for me when I was working, and now it's too late.
I sometimes wish I could, but I don't think my family meets the immigration requirements.
I hate feeling like I'm living in 1930 Germany.
Please study Canadian immigration rules before making this statement. You can "love to have somebody" but the question is, does your government too? (I lived for a while in your country and would have loved to stay - but I got ill.)
Yes, you can be Blocked!
Goodbye...
Is there a block function on this thing?
Is it possible that I don't ever receive another sour-breathed message from you??
Let me check...
You are ignoring the reverse migration back to Atlanta which became known as the Black capital and land of opportunity. Was that "God" messing up?
I live on the Atlanta Beltline in a condo. I walk to do most activities and put fewer than 2000 miles on my car last year. My gentrified neighborhood is pricey. The city has substantial multi family buildings being built and occupied. In town we are very blue.
The suburbs are a different animal than my neighborhood and rural GA seems a lost cause to disinformation.
Sadly even in my progressive area people are fighting light rail on the Beltline saying we cannot afford it. Glug!
I’m at the Rome airport returning to ATL after a month in Italy. The trains are great. Italy managed to build track and tunnels.
On migration out of GA. Until recently we enjoyed large film production projects. That industry has collapsed. I was a production sound mixer. Our tax incentives are no longer enough to keep shoots in GA.
Oh! I am sorry to hear that. It was - from what I saw - a flourishing industry.
Munich, Germany was also really well designed when it was rebuilt and became one of the most livable cities. The key was the absolutely fantastic, clean, and on-time subway system. I could go on and on about it, but bottom line is that you can get anywhere in Munich and its suburbs much faster than by car. And an app tells you EXACTLY when you’ll reach your destination from where you are!
The limits of sprawl were examined over 50 years ago in models about LA and then Houston, and the conclusion was that around 1 hr for a commute was generally the limit. Of course, people will drive more if they really need a job, and we all hear about people commuting over 2 hrs. My point is that for all of the US, the technology of transport has been frozen in a model developed over 50 years ago, and the only way to break out of it is to allow for greater density, zoning that does not require fixed ratios of parking per dwelling unit, and to maximize public transport. LA has been slow in changing, but it has added rail and increased density, as there is no way to increase net car traffic flow. In my dreams, all systems in the US would have positive train control system for safety and efficiency -- New York and Boston are in the process of installing them. Also, in my dreams, Boston would electrify all its commuter trains, which would allow for increased frequency of service. If we in the US were truly wise about transport, we would understand that everywhere in major cities, automobile traffic moves now at about 10 to 12 mph overall, and the only way to break free of this is a robust grid of public transit. Improvements are needed in circumferential transport, rather than what we have in most cities, which is radial from the city center. NY has, for example, been considering a route from Brooklyn to Queens on an existing right-of-way, and we need much more of that. Finally, we need to rethink transport in the last mile, which could be bicycle or even Musks fever dream of an autonomous taxi.
The last mile is critical. My spouse and I bought a house next to an end-of-the-line DC Metro Station in 1990 (before we retired, we were both Feds -- he at the FDA and I at the Smithsonian -- yes, it is sad). It took 25 years for the MD suburb to install a sidewalk, allowing us to walk less than a mile to the Metro Stop. Ridiculous.
The key to increasing mass transit use is to concentrate as many jobs as possible in a small downtown area: Calgary did this and thus has the third-highest mode share for transit in North America after New York and San Francisco, even though it is a right-wing city dominated by the oil industry (and thus also Canada's climate change denial capital) where almost all of the residential areas are low-density sprawl.
Los Angeles is the opposite extreme: while the city's overall population density is high by North American standards, there are no strong concentrations of jobs, and thus public transit is little used except by people too poor to afford cars.
Los Angeles's history as a boom town in the early 20th century (first from Hollywood and then from the industry that sprang up to support the war effort against Japan) didn't help either: boom towns tend to become very car-oriented as their residents have high disposable income (and thus can easily afford cars) while the city hasn't had time to build decent transit infrastructure.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/05/21/the-origins-of-los-angeless-car-culture-and-weak-center/
The challenge is to graft or overlay new transit to cope with the redevelopment and densification (sorry about the word) that occurs in time in places like LA and inevitably in a place like Atlanta. We see that process also happening in Boston, where big projects are built (and not enough of them) in areas where transit is lacking and the roads can't keep up (as in Watertown, Everett, Newton along I-95). What the public seems to not understand is that new major roads can't be built, and even if the existing ones are widened (as for the 405 in LA), the offramps go into city streets that remain congested, so we need to accept the reality that better mass transit is obligatory, with hard decision to make regarding bus lanes and and light rail. We need people to realize that when car-based transportation is at the tipping point of congestion-related failure, every car not on the road becomes a major benefit to all. People decry bicycles, but they carry the great efficiency, which benefits all, especially if bike lanes can be constructed without removing traffic lanes. People have decried the idea of removing fares, but if that gets people away from cars, especially for critically congested routes (as for the 111 line bus route in Boston from Chelsea), it again is of major benefit.
Folklore had it that a city's size was limited to a walk of 45 minutes, which is what it took to walk old Constantinople end to end.
...at which period tho? Because the city's actual urban area varied quite a bit over the centuries.
That CBTC and at least half size platform screen doors aren't standard on American metros prove just how backward we are. Also, cancelling the commuter rail tunnel in the Big Dig was such a mistake...
I lived in Atlanta 20 years and recently went back and drove quite a bit. The traffic, and miles and miles of it, absolutely suck. Why did I ever put up with losing so much of my life driving?
I once stayed at hotel in far Northeast suburban Atlanta. I had to cajole the front desk clerk to get a van ride to the closest MARTA stop. The only reason they went there, was to pick up the housekeeping staff. That’s the kind of attitude there about mass transit. It’s only for the poor. I also would like to add, there’s only one Amtrak train serving this huge city, and they haven’t had a passenger train running North or South since 1979! Kind of ridiculous!
My cousin lives in Atlanta. He needs to use “Waze” to decide how and where he will go buy his quart of milk. That is how bad the traffic is ! He is basically trapped in his house.
Could we mimic the Tokyo formula and drive down housing costs? My hunch is no. Americans treat housing as an investment and any policy that drives down housing costs, cheapens that "investment." That's what makes NIMBY such a powerful force.
What’s the Tokyo formula?
Described in the most basic way, land is absurdly valuable but houses themselves depreciate. As such they are redeveloped on a small lot basis every 30-40 years, keeping the relative price for renters acceptable since more housing can be constructed easily. This policy came about in large part due to earthquake standards, but if I recall urban land speculation is also illegal, so valuable plots don't sit empty in the hopes value continues to rise - people need to live there now.
Why do housing prices depreciate? I don’t if it true or not but I read that Japanese don’t like used cars. Maybe they don’t like used houses either? Or are earthquakes so bad that houses don’t last?
About Japanese not liking used cars, my understanding is that a majority of cars in Vladivostok are grey-market right-hand-drive imports from Japan.
Interesting,
Homes and land are valued and sold separately, I think. And yes, people do tend to be suspicious of used houses, because a lot of them would be fairly primitive compared to a new one, lacking things that most Americans take for granted, like central heating...
Atlanta, a red city? No way, Paul. Nor is Georgia a red state.
Atlanta a very blue city in a now generally purple state (R governor, two D senators).
As a resident of Alpharetta (a northern suburb of Atlanta "represented" by a freedom caucus adjacent Rich McCormick) I have to disagree with you. Democrats did not win a single statewide contest in the Ossoff vs. idiot election. We owe our two Dem senators to Herschel Walker being so obviously unqualified even many Republicans couldn't vote for him. There are areas that are turning more blue, like Marietta, but North Fulton is staunchly red, largely due to the people living in the many mega house subdivisions here. Georgia is not a purple state because of our Democrat senators. And so far all the Republicans running against Ossoff are proudly maga. The seat is in serious jeopardy.
Georgia would be less red except for the impact of gerrymandering.
In 2020, Jon Ossoff beat incumbent Republican US Senator David Purdue in a runoff. In that same runoff which concluded January 5, 2021, Raphael Warnock beat the other incumbent Republican US Senator Kelly Loeffler who had been appointed to the seat vacated by Johnny Isakson. Warnock held on to that seat in 2022 when he defeated Herschel Walker in a runoff. All were hard fought campaigns. There were no easy wins in GA regardless of the candidates, and Democratic votes state wide, not just those in deep blue Fulton and DeKalb counties helped deliver the US Senate for the Democrats (you are welcome, America). This historic win was overshadowed by the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Perdue now serves as ambassador to China; Loeffler heads the US Small Business Administration. Both are Trump appointees.
Thanks for the correction. The end result is the same though-Georgia just isn't purple.
“ It is possible for big cities to get it right. America could, for example, learn a lot from Tokyo. But I don’t expect to see that happening any time soon.”
Perhaps too many Americans have reached the Limits of Learning.
Where's the Census data on this? Why is Paul forced to use the Wayback Machine for it. The administration is disappearing many useful Federal data sets, paid for by tax dollars, to keep the public blind. This is wrong! It's Outrageous!
Thank heavens for the Wayback Machine. Donate! I do on a regular basis. https://archive.org/donate