Why didn't passenger rail survive in the USA? Two big reasons: - Railways poorly networked - Wide street, spaced buildings tendency
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When you get on a rail line at one station, you can get off at any station that is connected to the one you boarded at
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In other words: any other stop on that line, or linked by one or more transfers. In the USA, transfers between companies were avoided
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In other words, two railways serving the same town would have separate passenger stations, EVEN IF they connected lines elsewhere in town
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The functions of “connection” and “station” were divorced—connected tracks tended to be used for through service but weren’t sites of stops
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Why? Railways in the USA were optimized for freight traffic—you could make money from freight with less investment than passengers needed
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A given line might see several dozen freight trains per day, but only one or two passenger trains per direction
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So, LONG BEFORE cars were invented, travel by train—faster, admittedly, than walking or horse—was slow, involving long layovers at transfers
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In other countries, passenger rail was more extensively developed—more frequent service, transfer points as stations, etc
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In the USA, the shortcomings of passenger service on main line rail were so drastic that an entire parallel rail network grew—“interurbans”
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These were analogous to modern-day private railways in Japan; development companies speculating on land accessed by their lines
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But Japan’s “interurbans” were well-integrated with main lines, often sharing terminals, etc. In USA, this was rare.
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The interurbans, which often used the same public ROWs as horses and carts, were crowded out by cars; replaced with buses and abandoned
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The second point is important too, though—the cultural habit of making streets deliberately wide, and of spacing out buildings
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These habits were not present in Colonial America, by and large, and didn’t become common until the 19th century—but they predated cars
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The advent of steam power and the industrial revolution are probably the culprits—two reasons for this
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On the one hand, city industry was now largely a coal-fueled endeavor, and air quality diminished in urbanized areas
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On the other hand, ideas of standardization & master planning were getting fashionable—applying, even overapplying, the lessons of factories
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So one way or another, it became common for new development to occur in large strokes, instead of incrementally…
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…an entire neighborhood at a time, even—every street planned in advance, with uniform width instead of hierarchical width
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Pre-industrial revolution, streets were more or less just the residual space between buildings: wide when needed, narrow otherwise
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It should be pointed out that widening streets was not exclusive to the USA—European countries tried it at the same time, pre-automobile
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Haussmann’s work in Paris is the most famous example, but this tendency was most widespread in England and her colonies
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Japan industrialized later than Europe and missed this cultural trend—even in Europe, it never became common (except in the Anglosphere)
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Consequently, when Japanese cities modernized, they kept their narrow streets—even long after they came to dominate the car industry
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In other words—wide streets are an aesthetic choice that predate the car, not something made necessary *by* the car
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Since the USA experience most of its development during and after the industrial revolution, we have little experience with walkable cities
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And because our railways were optimized for freight—even tho in other countries, private railways in the 19th cent optimized for riders…
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…our railways were ineffective for passenger travel—Americans *needed* cars to be able to travel pragmatically
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Postscript: I think part of the reason our railways were optimized away from riders was due to an odd sense of “competition”
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That is, private railways weren’t willing to expand their ridership in a way that’d significantly expand ridership on another railway too
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