Same here. I lived in Ohio for many years, where the cities have (at best) skeletal bus systems. A car is a necessity for working.

Now I'm on the east coast, and I don't even need one because of the subway and plentiful bus and commuter rail options. If nothing else, it is SO much less expensive than owning, maintaining, and parking/storing a personal vehicle.
Obviously mass transit will not work for every person's situation/schedule/geographic locale, but I hope that the next president and next Congress gives serious support to the development of more commuter and subway lines in cities that do not currently have them (ex.: Columbus, Ohio, Seattle, Washington, Madison, Wisconsin, the Twin Cities, Minnesota, Altanta, Georgia, etc.). It's only a matter of time, in my estimation.

I don't know. It may be true in most places, but I lived in Nashville for a couple of years and there riding a bike as a commuter -- with a helmet and paniers and a purposeful attitude -- were taken by many as a cultural signifier. It meant you were an outsider, a yankee, an enemy. I was run off the road once, totaling my bike and ripping a parked car's side view mirror off. My wife was harassed by a police officer for riding her bike (legally and not obstructing traffic) in the road. Riding a bike was like having long hair and sporting a peace sign on your shirt. There were people who did both things, even natives who did, but lack of opportunity was not the only significant factor in people's commuting choices.

...on the other hand, this seems a little obvious: in northeastern cities, the economic incentives, really, push people to mass transit. Gas is expensive, parking's a hassle, the subway is cheap and it probably goes where you need it. It's not just that Irvine lacks public transport options, I'd argue; it's that Southern California makes it economically and socially more useful to drive (and while you might avoid freeways, you really can't avoid driving, regardless, at least in my brief experience... nor would you necessarily want to). In other words, you don't just get here and suddenly find an option - you find a new option because compared to a parking ticket, or a garage fee, it's easier and less expensive to use mass transit. And that, to me, seems sort of obvious. Interesting... but obvious.

I moved to DC because of the metro.

Next stop: London.

I don't know the public transportation systems in Atlanta or Toronto, but the thing about Boston is that the system is set up to be very good for some things and terrible for others. If you live near a T stop and you work near a T stop, especially somewhere in Boston proper, the T can't be beat, but the stops are too spread out especially out in the nearby suburbs, which is where most people live. Plus, out in the suburbs (I'm thinking of places like Somerville and Malden) most houses have easy street parking or a driveway, so the cost of owning a car is lower than in a place like NYC. Exacerbating the problem, though, is that the bus system isn't connected to the subway system (or wasn't as of 5 years ago when I lived there.) In NYC, your metro card gets you access to everything, but in Boston you could get a monthly T pass or a monthly bus pass or a combined more expensive pass.

In short, Boston could be a lot more public transport friendly with a few minor adjustments, the main one being better integration of the bus and subway systems. Given that such a large portion of the city is really only accessable with a combination of bus and subway travel my first move would be to unify the fares and find a way to unify the maps so that you can see all of your options on one map. Those two things alone would be relatively cheap and would I think make a big difference.

I live in Salem, 17 miles north of Boston. It's not really a 'suburb', it's better thought of as the northern tip of the metro-Boston complex.

We have a commuter rail station, but unless you live within walking distance of it, it's not an effective solution. Parking at the station is scarce and expensive. Only 1-2 buses take you to the station, and they are slow and unreliable. You can only show up late to work once or twice and not risk your job in the city.

The MBTA has had provisional plans to bring the Blue Line (which serves northern coastal communites like Revere, and also Logan airport) up to Salem since at least the mid-1960s. Every time funding is discussed, the locals will have none of it: Bringing the Blue Line to Salem would "change the character of the city" (translation-- it would "allow minorites from Lynn, Revere and Chelsea to get here more easily").

I think there are still many cultural barriers to extending public transportation systems. $8/gal gas will change these attitudes right quick... but will that be too late?

Subway maps in Boston are awful, but there are now free subway-bus transfers with the "Charlie Card" (different than the monthly passes). For bus-subway transfers, you just pay the difference (bus is 45 cents cheaper).

I haven't taken public transit in Boston, but I have taken it in DC, Manhattan, Denver, San Francisco, LA (yikes), Contra Costa County (east of the East Bay -- yikes squared).. and London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Prag, etc etc etc.

The northeast has nothing on a well-designed European system, even in a small city. Basel is the size of Oakland, has a streetcar system better than SF's Muni, and despite lots of driving, I'd guess half of commuters never get in their cars. So, yes, infrastructure matters, but so does execution. Darned Swiss.

And $8 isn't enough. Your car is $300/mo, plus insurance, plus parking, plus maintenance, plus the time and effort to drive it... plus $100 in gas. Doubling that to $200 changes the equation a little, but not tons. At $12 gas, fuel costs start to dominate and at $16 they're a real issue, but not at $4 or $6 or $8.

I don't know. Why do you think that so many US cities do not have good mass transit? Why did NY have so much transit money sent to cars in the 70s and 80s (and maybe the 90s)? The cultural argument is right, but Ezra is looking at the wrong side. The culture is on the creation and maintenance side, not the use side.

"in northeastern cities, the economic incentives, really, push people to mass transit. Gas is expensive, parking's a hassle, the subway is cheap and it probably goes where you need it"

If by 'northeastern cities', you mean NYC metro and Boston, then yes, they have good public transportation. (You could even throw Philadelphia and DC in there, I suppose).

Outside of those cities however, mass transit in the Northeast sucks just as bad as the rest of the country. Albany, Hartford, Springfield and Providence are fairly dense cities from the pre-car era and they have no great mass transit to speak of. That's not to mention the rest of Upstate NY, western Massachusetts and vast swaths of Pennsylvania.

The US is really, really spread out, even in the 'crowded' northeast. The rest of the US is even worse, but that doesn't the vast majority of the northeast is good.

I'd be curious to know where those Krugman numbers come from and what they mean. Does it mean strictly people who drive door to door? What about people who drive part way? For example, many people drive to within 10 miles of Boston and jump on a subway there. Its very expensive to actually park in the city. Maybe there are more wealthy people than I know of!

I second some of the notions about Boston's improving situation, but the city and America as a whole just doesn't take this stuff seriously. I haven't seen any of the European transit systems but when I hear about things like bullet trains, I wonder why we don't have these sorts of things on say the West Coast where getting from Cali to Portland to Seattle would benefit greatly from.

This shouldn't be a surprise though. When it comes to funding anything, its difficult to get a Prop 2.5 override.

JBL-- Thanks for the update, the Charlie Card does seem like a big improvement. I see that part of the change also involved changing the ticket collection system on the Green Line--has that resulted in improvements? The Green line is, or at least was, terrible. Everything else in the T system is too spread out, but the Green line stops every hundred yards or so and as a result takes for eeeevvvver.

It's sort of interesting that this post draws out the Boston critics; I too lived the past two years in Boston and I'd echo every point here: the T system is great, if you're near it, but not good if you're far from it, it does little to create disincentives for cars, and it's poorly managed. Common sense would have pushed Charlie Cards to offer free transfers two to three years before they did, even so they still charge too much. And not only is the Blue Line planning in poor shape, but the fact that the MBTA has an existing Green line out to Arborway that riders actually want and they refuse to refurbish is just perverse.

The point, here, I think is that mass transit planning has never been an American strong suit (which is why the snarky "Europe does it better" point is obvious, and beside the actual point of what to do now). Even NYC's system - pretty much the nation's most comprehensive - is poorly managed, in deep financial trouble, and unable to do common sense expansions (the 2nd Avenue line, the 7 extension to the Javits Center, bringing the LIRR into Grand Central) that would move the system forward. That, after all, is the heart of Krugman's point... and the recent debate over "congestion pricing" in a nutshell.

If you want to understand what we can't do, I'd say, look more at Boston and DC, which are models of the oldest and youngest systems around the US; both do some things well, mostly involving moving first ring suburbanites to the urban core and taking them back out again at night... but not much else. The fact that, with something like 100 years separating them, we haven't progressed much in how we think about mass transit in this country, is the real problem here... one that I'm not sure we'll ever really solve (though with gas prices as they are, we probably have to).

Krugman's numbers are way off from what I've always heard.

11%? It's about 30% according to this:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/13/real_estate/public_transit_commutes/index.htm

As far as the complainers, the only thing I agree with is that the Green Line. The other lines, including the commuter rail, are all very efficient. The issue is the "spokey" design and getting from spoke to spoke... it takes 45 minutes to get from Allston to Harvard Square by T when it's a 5-10 minute drive. People should take the bus, but for whatever reason they don't... maybe the attempts to connect the lines with the dedicated bus things will work, dunno.

Whoops, should be a "sucks" after "Green Line", which is a sentiment that any Bostonian can probably get behind.

As another Irvine ex-pat who moved to DC, I have to say that if you didn't bike in Irvine, it was your own fault. That city is very bike-able, and in many cases it was faster for me to "shortcut" over Yale bridge to Southlake instead of driving on Jeffrey to the loop, or take the nature trail to school instead of driving up Ridgeline.

Biking is a lifestyle choice more than anything else. I hear Yglesias pining for "bike friendly infrastructure," and it seems very quaint. Irvine is a perfect example of a city built with both bikers and drivers in mind, and as it turns out, people are lazy and prefer to drive.

The big difference between DC and Irvine is that DC is "walkable." Irvine is not.

I too lived the past two years in Boston and I'd echo every point here: the T system is great, if you're near it, but not good if you're far from it...

The stupidity of such statements in this thread is maddening. Pray tell, which subway system in the world doesn't work better for people who live near a subway station than far from one? I imagine a Parisian living in the heart of the city a few blocks from a metro station is served better by the system than some poor chap in a distant banlieu who's got a forty minute walk to his nearest subway station.

Also, Boston has had an integrated bus/subway fare system for decades. It just costs more to purchase a combined monthly pass. This may or may not be sound public policy, but it's certainly rational: plenty of Bostonians use only one mode or the other, so a reduced price for non-combined monthly passes seems in order. But you've always been able to buy a more expensive pass that covers bus and subway fares (or commuter rail, for that matter, if you pay even more).

Whoops, should be a "sucks" after "Green Line", which is a sentiment that any Bostonian can probably get behind...

Not any Bostonian who knows what they're talking about. It's true that the "B" branch of the Green Line sucks (the "E" is not much better) but the C and D branches (which, shocker of shockers, service affluent Brookline and Newton) are both excellent. A good friend of mine lives in Cleveland Circle. She has the option of either the C or D branches to get to her Financial District job; her commute rarely takes more than twenty minutes or so.

...it takes 45 minutes to get from Allston to Harvard Square by T when it's a 5-10 minute drive. People should take the bus, but for whatever reason they don't...

Nonsense. Plenty of people take the bus. The #66 gets you from Allston to Harvard Square in 10-15 minutes. If people are too lazy to visit a website and learn a very-easy-to-understand bus schedule, that's their fault.

I live in Toronto and use the ttc and find most people hate it. The street cars are slow and often inefficiently clump together. But of course we take it (especially students like myself) because it is heavily subsidized by the government.

So, you might say we don't really have a choice. It is like saying people have a choice to smoke (at least in Canada with such high taxes).

My question is why is mass transit a public good? I know in the States driving is subsidized or encouraged, which distorts choices, but why must the government do the same thing for transit. Isn't transit rival and excludable? Perhaps mass transit is a natural monopoly deserving of government intervention but to arbitrarily promote its use doesn't seem fair to commuters. I would be much happier if instead of trying to subsidize the cost of transit, Ezra was trying to take away the subsidies for driving.

Not any Bostonian who knows what they're talking about. It's true that the "B" branch of the Green Line sucks (the "E" is not much better) but the C and D branches (which, shocker of shockers, service affluent Brookline and Newton) are both excellent. A good friend of mine lives in Cleveland Circle. She has the option of either the C or D branches to get to her Financial District job; her commute rarely takes more than twenty minutes or so.

So I don't know what I'm talking about because only half of the Green Line sucks. Uhm, whatever. But actually, I lived in Cleveland Circle for years and daily took the C or D line to North Station(45 minutes minimum) where I work and I would say that only the D line deserves an asterisk as not completely sucking. This is because, unlike the other Green Lines, doesn't have to deal with traffic and has much fewer stops. Regardless, however, it takes much longer to get anywhere than the other subway lines.

Nonsense. Plenty of people take the bus. The #66 gets you from Allston to Harvard Square in 10-15 minutes. If people are too lazy to visit a website and learn a very-easy-to-understand bus schedule, that's their fault.

Oh really? So I was just imagining that whole "Urban Ring" project to fix clearly nonexistent problems in public transit utility?

Gordon, mass transit is a public good because if we don't reduce greenhouse gas emissions we're going to reap potentially catastrophic environmental consequences (ask the scientests!)

Also, while most people do indeed hate the TTC that is because it is underfunded; I'm sure some segments of the system are subsidized, but the streetcars and original subway lines make money.

Most people probably are not aware that Atlanta, poster child of sprawl, has a rail system and has had one since the early 70s. I doubt that DC's rail system is very much better than Atlanta's, though I haven't been to DC since I was a small child so I could be wrong.

What's sad is that, in spite of the rail system (MARTA) Atlanta continued to sprawl out beyond all redemption. One problem is that the city was already spread out when the rail system was built. Another is that the system basically only has two lines, north/south and east/west. And stops are few and far between. The MARTA system was poorly conceived and poorly executed, and that's why there's a movement afoot to implement a light rail system (MARTA being very much heavy rail) that serves a lot more stops in the inner city.

Charlie, my congratulations. I knew there had to be someone out there to defend the T... it couldn't just be fictional. :)

JW's got good rebuttals; I'd add these: D line construction - at the height of baseball season??? - has been a massive inconvenience, with little useful alternatives; no one complains about the C line, I'd agree... but that's cause it's duplicative of B&D, to a large extent, and everyone hates those. (D Line on game day! Whoo!)

As for the 66 bus, I actually have experience on that score too - ask my friend who lives in Brighton and goes to MIT about poor adherence to schedules (everyone says it about MBTA buses, really; the waits for #1s in the winter are unconscionable). There are thoughtful bus routes that deal in the realities of where people live and go to school (less so, I found, with where people live and work... but schools are a big part of Boston), but that doesn't make using them less frustrating.

In any case, Charlie, you surely can't be blind to the loathing Bostonians have for the T. It's not like I made it up. And I believe firmly in mass transit (i am a New Yorker for that reason), so it took a long time - and a lot of missed trains and endless bus waits - for me to loathe the T like a native. But hey, keep up the good work! I hear MBTA could use new PR! :)

Gordon-- Public transportation is a public good in the same way that public roads are. Society has a vested interest in making travel easy and convenient. Any metropolitan area is going to have public transit whether it's publicly owned or now, because there will be enough people who can't afford their own private transportation that offering the service will be a viable business model. But without a monopoly, you'll have grossly inefficient competing systems. That would be an economic and social drag on the whole society (from a purely economic standpoint, inefficiency means losses in productivity.) In fact, the people who drive get direct benefit from the existence of public transit--their employees are more productive, and their roads are less clogged. So there's a missing market in that drivers benefit from the existence of the public transit but since they don't use it they don't pay for it. The easiest solution is some combination of taxation and driving fees.

I live in Toronto and use the ttc and find most people hate it. The street cars are slow and often inefficiently clump together. But of course we take it (especially students like myself) because it is heavily subsidized by the government.

Gordon Gekko is of course dead wrong, not that this should surprise anybody. Eighty-five percent of the TTC's budget comes from fare collection. It's the least-publicly funded transit system in the world - most transit systems are fifty to seventy-five percent publicly funded.

Every knowledgeable transit critic discussing the TTC says the problem is that it's underfunded because it relies almost exclusively on municipal funding - and the city can't afford to spend much - and gets peanuts from the provincial and federal government; as a result, service suffers enormously and expansion happens rarely if ever.

The result: a system stressed to capacity that still manages to perform better than most transit systems in North America. But that doesn't fall in line with Gordon's personal ideology, so he blathers about inefficient government spending. This is because he is an idiot.

"That's not to mention the rest of Upstate NY, western Massachusetts and vast swaths of Pennsylvania."

Actually, PA has generally pretty good mass transit, even in the hick parts (by hick standards), all things considered. My isolated hometown of 12,000 had full bus service. Philly and to a lesser extent Pittsburgh are quite good. And the ATA covers a sparse swath of rural PA bigger than most or maybe all U.S. metro areas...seven counties in all.

Check it out: http://www.tcrpc-pa.org/text/SRTPChap06.htm

I'm a 16-year veteran of the daily Boston Green Line commute. Yes, the 66 bus and the "B" line are both horrible, especially when BU is in session which of course is most of the time.

The T has extremely grandiose plans for expansion, not just to Salem as noted above but out to Route 128 in several directions. Of course it is short of operating cash and already heavily in debt.

People need to understand that the T is a subsidy FOR DRIVERS as will as riders, as suggested above. Then maybe the funding will show up.

I would LOVE it if biking or public transportation to work were feasible here in greater San Diego but my 14-mile commute would take an hour and a half each way by public transportation and longer by bike given the geography. I'm inefficient enough and can't spare 3 hours a day. For me, driving isn't cultural.

Now my neighbors are running a campaign to stop high-rise development, which they call "vertical sprawl" in the interests of maintaining what they imagine is the village-like charm of the 1950s vintage ticky-tacky suburb in which I live, which is currently oozing miles into the surrounding dessert. They've just come canvassing to tell me that I should support their program because high-rises would block the breeze from my house, ruin the character of our downtown and bankroll evil developers.

Now that IS cultural. Most Americans want to pretend that they live in small towns even though they want access to jobs in the city and access to the amenities of urban areas. So the suburbs, at least here in So.Cal. just keep sprawling and decent public transportation becomes increasingly unfeasible.

I'm going to disagree with ERM about Philly's transit system. It's abysmal. It's quasi-public, quasi-private, with all the negatives of private ownership and all the negatives of public ownership. The subway/rail options are limited, there's only a couple trolley lines, using buses to get from one suburb to another is nigh-impossible... etc etc.

The solution is further investment, another subway line or 2, expanded trolley service, better bus routes... but a lot of people think the solution is "screw SEPTA". Sigh.

So I don't know what I'm talking about because only half of the Green Line sucks. Uhm, whatever.

You didn't say "half the Green Line" sucks. You didn't use the qualifier "half." So yes, I would include you in the category of people who don't know what they're talking about when it comes to the MBTA. Apparently a preference for accuracy and a dislike of sweeping overstatement make me unreasonable. Uhm, whatever.

Oh really? So I was just imagining that whole "Urban Ring" project to fix clearly nonexistent problems.

You said "nobody takes the bus" and then went on to describe a absurd scenario involving a train ride from Allston to Harvard Square. The first part of your statement is manisfestly untrue (or "nonsense" to use my phrase) as many tens of thousands of Bostonians ride the bus each day. And the second part of your statement is absurd because a bus route exists which obviates the need to take a circuitous train ride to go the, oh, mile and a half or so from Allston to Harvard Square.

...D line construction - at the height of baseball season??? - has been a massive inconvenience, with little useful alternatives...

Baseball season lasts most of the year if the Red Sox make the playoffs. Would you have the bulk of infrastructure work take place in the middle of the New England winter? And at any rate, you can't have improvements to infrastructure without temporary inconvenience.

In any case, Charlie, you surely can't be blind to the loathing Bostonians have for the T.

It is human nature to complain. I would imagine every public transportation system has its detractors. Still, much of the T's problems stem from the fact that people are loving it to death. Ridership is way up over the last few years. The MBTA must be doing something right. And in any event, plenty of Bostonians find the T to be convenient, relatively cheap (especially when compared to maintaining a car in Boston), and tolerably efficient. I exclude, those poor souls who rely on the B Line -- a thoroughly horrible stretch of rail.

The bus combines the worst of mass transit and car travel. You're on someone else's schedule, you wait outside, for accessibility reasons they make an interminable number of stops (every block in my neighborhood) and you also have to deal with traffic, lights, road noise, slamming breaks. I take it every day from Southie to downtown, and I really miss the Red Line from Cambridge.

I agree that the problem is not that no one takes the bus in Boston, but that too many people do. In addition to the 66 and 1 (both of which I have used), I would add the 7 and 9 as being chronically crowded and delayed.

Charlie. Charlie. Charlie...

Okay, after I stop giggling my ass off (really, man, admit it... you work for the T, doncha?) I can only say... come on. "Loving it to death"? Yeah, that's the way I remember it. Loving it so much... you just couldn't appreciate it enough. Uh-huh. Not the part where you waited 45 minutes for an E train at Prudential, only to have one car arrive completely full. Not the part where you waited 60 minutes for a 1 or a 69 at Harvard Square in the dead of winter... and, nothing. Ridership is way up... yet the T's last concern is service improvemeents and consistency of service that would make people know that they could count on a bus or train to show up as scheduled (and don't get me started on how the T's union is why I now find myself less supportive of unions generally).

Let's face it: The T is a monopoly. People ride it because the alternative is being stuck on 93 or 90 or 128, or trapped on Storrow for hours. That's not love... it's necessity. The Kenmore renovation has taken absurdly long for no discernible reason. I agree that repairs on lines would crash into baseball season... but it's perverse for the T to pick the week of Opening Day (which they did) to start D line work (Kenmore... and Fenway. Brilliant!), and conclude at about the height of playoffs. Surely there's some balance to find. Winter and the off season are not completely overlapping (and even where they are... better planning for alternative routes, detours, bus service... not hard).

Really, though, you seem far more passionate about excusing any and every failing of the T than discussing the larger dilemmas of mass transit, which was really my point, and the point of this post... as well as, I'd daresay the other Boston critics. I've been connected to Boston my whole life, and really, this has not changed - as you say, rather than improve the things it already does poorly, the T launches massive plans to stretch further and do more while ignoring the rot within. T ridership costs more than New York's subway, more than DC... more than Baltimore, even, and Baltimore's system really sucks (really). But what really concerns me is that Boston's not an outlier... it's just perhaps a little worse than a few others. Which is a good indication, I'd say, of just how troubled our mass transit systems really are.

But really, I can't weait to hear how wonderful Boston's subways are. Again. :)

I don't know the public transportation systems in Atlanta

The yuk-yuk backronym for MARTA is 'Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta'. The suburbs/exurbs actively resisted MARTA stations out of a fear that it would allow black folks from south ATL to ride up to Gwinnett and Cobb County, steal their TVs, and ride back home. Or, worse, decide to move there because they could take the MARTA into town.

White suburban Atlantans might take the MARTA (rail) into town or park-and-ride to the airport, but the idea of commuting still frankly spooks many of them. They'd rather sit in traffic on the downtown connector or GA400 than share a train carriage with people of a darker hue.

The density and geography of most American cities would be better served with more and better bus service. Cheaper, scales better, uses existing infrastructure, routing flexibility, etc.

Phoenix is a driver's paradise with wide, fast streets squared out in a perfect north-south grid. It could have an amazing bus, trolley or light rail system, too. But the buses only run every half hour.

So I dropped my motorcycle off at the shop last week, and rode the bus home. To go 6 miles by motorcycle took 15 minutes and burned $0.60 of gas, while the bus took over an hour for $1.25.

I also work about 6 miles from home, and to take the bus to work would take over 2 hours because there's no direct route. I'd have to backtrack 2 miles and do 2 transfers. I'd have no time left to read blogs, for crying out loud!