Title: The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been

Author: Jake Berman

Completed: August 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: I’ve had one or two people tell me recently that I seem to be obsessed with public transit. Not sure I’d phrase it that way, but I do believe that many problem we currently face would be better (not completely solved but certainly better), if we relied more on transit and less on cars. This book describes how it once was in the US and Canada, why it changed, and how it might change again.

Living in Seattle, that chapter resonated most. He quoted the Seattle Weekly in 1983 discussing politics in the city as following “the usual Seattle process of seeking consensus through exhaustion,” which feels just as true today. We’re still using the same technique for projects like safety improvements along Lake Washington Boulevard. Perhaps some day we’ll be able to make a decision just because it’s the right thing to do, without having to wait until everyone is too exhausted to care any more.

Highlights:

• Pacific Electric stood astride Southern California like a colossus, with over a thousand miles of electric rail service. And transportation wasn’t the only thing the Pacific Electric had its tentacles in—the Pacific Electric was also the largest real estate developer in Southern California. Towns kowtowed before the company to attract a station. One town, Pacific City, had even renamed itself Huntington Beach, after the Pacific Electric’s founder.
• I had assumed that cars in Los Angeles were just a fact of life, like beaches, palm trees, and tacos. But that wasn’t the case at all. Gridlock was a choice that the people of Los Angeles had made.
• San Francisco opened a municipal streetcar company to challenge its privately owned streetcar monopoly. The city-owned Municipal Railway ultimately outcompeted the privately owned Market Street Railway and bought it out.
• Good mass transit should be fast, frequent, and reliable, and it should go where people want to go.
• Subway, elevated, and metro all describe the same thing: an electric railway system that is fully separated from other traffic, like the New York Subway, the Chicago Elevated, and the Montreal Metro. They are the highest-capacity form of mass transit, but the most expensive to build.
• Light rail is an electric railway system that has dedicated lanes or trackways. Stations average about every half mile in the urban center and about every mile outside city cores. Light rail systems still have some intersections with cross traffic. This makes light rail slower than subways, but cheaper to build.
• Streetcars and trolleys are electric railway systems that provide local transportation. They run in normal traffic, stopping every few blocks.
• A related technology is the electric trolleybus, an electric bus powered by streetcar-style overhead wire. Common in Europe, trolleybuses are rare in North America.
• Busways, also known as bus rapid transit, are a hybrid between light rail and the humble city bus. A fully built busway system has dedicated lanes, ticket machines, dedicated platforms, and priority at traffic signals. When done well, like the G Line in Los Angeles, busways provide nearly as good service as light rail at a fraction of the cost.
• Segregationists like Lester Maddox fought an urban rapid transit system tooth and nail, while Georgia threw billions of dollars into new expressways.
• Between 1950 and 1980, greater Boston’s population growth rate was half the national average. Deindustrialization, the population exodus to the Sun Belt, and the invention of air conditioning all took their toll. The textile, leather, and clothing industries, which had been the backbone of Massachusetts’s economy for over a century, decamped for the South. By March 1976, Massachusetts’s unemployment rate was 38 percent higher than the national average.
• the national economy was in the middle of a full-scale meltdown. The crash started when rope monopoly National Cordage Company and the giant Philadelphia & Reading Railroad became insolvent in early 1893.3 A chain reaction ensued, and a string of surprise bankruptcies hit every sector of the economy. Across the country, 575 banks failed.4 Unemployment skyrocketed from 4 percent in 1892 to 18 percent in 1894.
• Yerkes departed Chicago, sold his transit empire, and moved to London. On arrival, he proceeded to play hardball with the English, using the same tactics he learned in Chicago to buy up failing companies that would become part of the London Underground.
• In the early 2020s, the elevated Loop is still at capacity, as it has been for a century. The L has expanded minimally since the airport extensions reached O’Hare in 1984 and Midway in 1993. Downtown Chicago hasn’t gotten any new L lines since the Blue Line’s downtown subway was finished in 1951. All the same, L ridership increased by 70 percent in the pre-coronavirus decades.
• Further complicating the situation, Cincinnati’s municipal government had decreed that the local streetcar network be built to nonstandard dimensions. The overwhelming majority of North American railways have a track gauge (i.e., the distance between the rails) set at 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Cincinnati required rails to be placed 5 feet, 2.5 inches apart. This decision was originally made to prevent steam trains from running on city streets, and it created a major dilemma for Cincinnati’s interurban companies.
• Cincinnati conveniently had a derelict canal running through its downtown that was suitable for subway conversion. (Similar canal-to-subway conversions also occurred in Newark, New Jersey and Rochester, New York.) This reuse of the old canal bed meant that costs were expected to be much lower than in Boston and New York, where more extensive tunneling was needed.
• Before it was shut down due to coronavirus, Cleveland’s light rail line, the Waterfront Line, carried so few passengers that the press dubbed it “the Ghost Train.”3 In 2016, 20 years after its opening, the Waterfront Line carried only 400 passengers per day, even with trains running every 15 minutes.
• football-specific stadiums don’t see enough use to permit a surrounding entertainment district to develop. Excluding playoff games, NFL stadiums host only 10 home games a year, and other events are rare. In the first 17 years of its existence, Browns Stadium hosted only 33 ticketed non-football events—fewer than two a year. Few musicians, religious revivals, rodeos, and so on can fill a 70,000-seat stadium, especially in a midsized metropolis like Cleveland.
• like other baseball-anchored neighborhoods such as Wrigleyville, Chicago, and Fenway, Boston. Visitors are encouraged to take transit and enjoy the neighborhood before games, compared to Cleveland’s culture of driving in and tailgating in a parking lot. In a sense, this creates a self-reinforcing loop. Cleveland favors suburban drivers with its infrastructure, so more people drive. San Francisco favors pedestrians and transit, so more people walk or take the train.
• it’s not legal to build homes, like it was in the old days.3 The solitary apartment building under construction near Parker Road had to get a special variance from the Plano City Council. This variance took years to wind its way through the bureaucracy. The nearest place where it’s legal to build housing without special dispensation is three-quarters of a mile away on foot. There’s just no convenient way to take the train without driving or transferring from a bus.
• Metro Detroit’s transit system reflected the toxicity of this relationship. Although 67 percent of city residents work outside the city, and 75 percent of workers in the city live in the suburbs, most suburban buses weren’t allowed to stop in the city as late as the mid-2010s.6
• In the 1969 election, the law-and-order candidate, former Wayne County sheriff Roman Gribbs, was elected mayor. As mayor, Gribbs promptly brought the hammer down, creating a secret, elite undercover police unit called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) to reduce street crime. STRESS officers wandered around what were considered dangerous areas posing as old ladies, alcoholics, priests, and other easy targets. When an alleged mugger appeared, supporting units pounced. STRESS operations routinely ended in violence. Between 1971 and the unit’s disbandment in 1974, STRESS officers shot and killed 22 civilians, the vast majority black men. STRESS was popular among whites and detested by blacks. Crime rates kept rising.
• In 1975, when asked by the New York Times about the potential long-term consequences of sprawl, Mayor Fred Hofheinz remarked simply, “Houston is a very growth-oriented city, and there is very little opposition to that proposition.” By 2020, 2.3 million people lived inside the 640-square-mile city limits, making it one-third as dense as Chicago and half as dense as Los Angeles.
• ample supply of housing also means that Houston’s gentrification is slower than other wealthy cities. With the abundance of housing options, affluent Houstonians tend to move to existing prosperous neighborhoods. In cities like Los Angeles, those same types of families tend to move to more marginal neighborhoods and price out the working classes. The average Los Angeles house costs 3.6 times what it does in Houston.
• Beverly Hills’ population at the 1970 census was 33,416, and by 1990, it had shrunk to 31,971. Santa Monica shrank from 88,289 to 86,905. These new housing supply restrictions caused home prices to skyrocket. Increased property values meant higher property taxes. In previous eras of development, homeowners who couldn’t afford their taxes would sell to apartment developers and pocket the cash. But 1970s homeowners wanted both high home values and low property taxes. A man named Howard Jarvis tapped into that desire.
• As of 2020, greater Los Angeles covered an area twice the size of Switzerland.
• there was only one place in North America where a relatively healthy streetcar system fell victim to a conspiracy. That place was the Twin Cities: Minneapolis and St. Paul (fig. 11.1). The Twin City Rapid Transit Company was a national model for how to run a transit system until a Wall Street financier, a crooked lawyer, and the Minneapolis mob came along and stripped it for parts. High-capacity rail transit wouldn’t return to the Twin Cities until the 21st century.
• Nine days after the Metro opened, Montrealers went to the polls. Drapeau won reelection with 94 percent of the vote.
• mix of geographical accident and traditional dominance allowed New Orleans to retain its unique culture and historical continuity. It’s not for nothing that the famed St. Charles streetcar line has been running continuously since Andrew Jackson was president. Even when the rest of the continent was busy tearing out streetcar tracks, the St. Charles streetcar survived without much fuss.
• All lines were converted to use electric power in the 1890s after abortive experiments with mechanical cables, superheated water, and ammonia-powered locomotives. From the 1920s onward, all streetcars were run by New Orleans Public Service Inc. (NOPSI), the local electric company.
• Generally speaking, light rail and streetcar lines use similar equipment.15 The differences between the two are in operational procedures. To provide fast, high-capacity service, the best practice is to provide the trains dedicated lanes, run multiple-car trains, sell tickets to passengers before they board, give trains priority at intersections, and build stops every half mile or so when operating in dense areas. This exploits rail’s largest advantage: the ability to move large numbers of people quickly.
• By 1975, the economy was stagnant, inflation was high, and the city government was in the middle of a fiscal crisis. With the city in danger of defaulting on its debts, Mayor Abe Beame ordered Second Avenue Subway construction to halt in September 1975. The next month, the city had to be saved from insolvency by the city teachers union’s pension fund.
• Ideally, mass transit should do four things. One, it should be frequent; two, it should be fast; three, it should be reliable; and four, it should go where people want to go. The choice of technology matters somewhat, but only to the extent that one picks an appropriate tool for the job.
• The average horse pulling a horsecar had a life expectancy of two years.
• MTA board committed to building the full 10-mile line in 2000. Twenty-two years later, only 1.8 miles of two-track subway is complete. The cost has been $2.5 billion per mile, making it the most expensive piece of subway in the world.17 Per mile, New York paid two and half times what Los Angeles pays, six times what Tokyo pays, and 14 times what Milan pays.18 The challenges of building subways in New York City are not technological compared to these other cities. Los Angeles has earthquakes. Tokyo has earthquakes and is very densely populated. Milan is 2,500 years old, introducing archaeological and geological complexity. Rather, the challenges of building new subways relate to the MTA’s competence as an institution.
• There’s a German saying in transportation planning that a transit operator’s order of priorities should be Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton, or organization before electronics before concrete. That is, the most important factor in running effective mass transit is the bread and butter of everyday transit operations, rather than state-of-the-art technology. Building new physical infrastructure should be a last resort. Many public transport agencies and the politicians who oversee them don’t think this way.
• After the demise of Seattle’s prewar streetcar and cable car system, plans to build a rapid transit network stalled for half a century. In part, these plans fell through because Seattle’s political culture puts a premium on consensus, letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.
• After this second failure, the federal government pulled its funding commitment. The money earmarked for Seattle would go to Atlanta. Atlanta used the money to build the MARTA subway.
• But by 1983, endless deliberations and public consultations had become so well established that the Seattle Weekly coined a name for it: “the usual Seattle process of seeking consensus through exhaustion.”
• On paper, this is a nation-leading expansion of transit, but its sheer slowness is telling. There’s little reason to believe that timelines or budgets will be met, given the Seattle Process and the region’s history of persistent planning delays.
• Toronto politicians realized that that the coming postwar influx of automobiles would choke the city in car traffic. (Unusually, Toronto kept its streetcar network after World War II, because the TTC decided to buy lightly used streetcars secondhand from cities that were closing their systems.)
• Since its inception, SkyTrain has expanded steadily over the past three and a half decades, and it is very popular among Vancouverites
• SkyTrain is practically a unicorn among North American metro systems, because it’s an elevated that nearly everybody likes.
• it appears likely that these land use reforms, coupled with large simultaneous investments in local rapid transit, will lead to a resurgence of traditional, walkable cities. The more tricky question is how to make this transition go faster. Improving transit and building urban infill is often a painful slog in the early 21st century. Examples are everywhere in this book. New York approved the Second Avenue Subway in 2000. It took 17 years to complete its 1.8 mile first phase. The predecessor to Toronto’s Ontario Line has been a political football since the 1980s, and the line won’t be complete until 2031. Low-cost reforms to improve transit service often fall by the wayside, as with Philadelphia’s Regional Rail. Infill, especially in wealthy cities, commonly faces prolonged timelines and persistent delays, as in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But things don’t have to be like this.
• Today’s slow, bureaucratic approach to urban growth was not always normal. After all, New York City’s first subway line was approved in 1899, and it opened to the public five years later. The Montreal Metro was approved in 1960, and the initial system was fully operational six years later.