(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 562: The Lost Subways of North America

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Jake Berman to talk about his book, The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been. We discuss transit histories through the lens of racial dynamics, monopolies, ballot measures, and overlooked cities.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript so there are some messy parts.  But it’s mostly good…

Jake Berman: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

The particular freeway to blame is the 1 0 1 through Hollywood in Los Angeles. And I had been stuck behind a guy in a Jeep for roughly half an hour. The kind of fellow with too many bumper stickers. And I was just thinking to myself, my commute is five miles. What am I doing with my life? Why am I stuck behind this city in a traffic jam that hasn’t moved for half an hour?

So I went to the library. And I started doing research on what happened to LA’s once, vaunted Public Transit network. And as it turned out, it wasn’t just LA that had this kind of collapse of the public transit network, it was all across North America. And one thing led to another and I started making maps of both the vanished public transit networks and what could have been, had the politics come out a different way.

I just find that fascinating that. You had a different way of thinking about things and process for going about thinking like why did this happen versus like the other direction that you could have gone which is evil megalomaniac. But

Madrid to Seville faster than you can go to the airport, get on a plane, go from Madrid to Seville, and then get to the city center from the airport. Like it was very well known to me that public infrastructure for public transport is far better abroad than it is in the states. So I was thinking to myself stuck in the freeway, Spain is a much poorer country than.

United States, right? Like my counterparts in my day job who do the exact same job, make a third or half of what I make. And yet it’s much easier to get around Spain without a car than the United States. And that’s really what led me down this road in the first place. The transport problem is not something that can or should really be solved with technological innovation.

We should be ripping off the best ideas from other places. We should be imitating them, not innovating.

That was like what led me into this whole thing. But was it just the sitting in traffic or was it something it was already inside of you from when you were younger? I did play way too much Sim City when I was a kid.

It was a birthday gift from I think one of my family friends, and then Sim City 2000, and it’s been like that ever since.

You would never expect places like say Detroit. Atlanta and Los Angeles to have parallel trajectories with anything, right? LA is the quintessential suburban city. It’s as California as you get. Atlanta is the capital of the South. Detroit is a Midwestern industrial town, and yet. When it comes to the transport question, so much of what got built and what didn’t get built was based on the race question.

And there, it wasn’t really a race question, but I went and looked at all these histories of these different networks like you did. And what I found was. I actually dug into the reports that were housed at Princeton, the Office of Technology Assessment. And they had done like these community planning reports for all of these systems that were being planned in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.

So you looked at Detroit, you looked at Atlanta, and I think the one that surprised me the most, and maybe just ’cause I was in college and I didn’t know any better from a planning perspective, but Atlanta and the impact of the race discussion was so thick and so deep that it made me think about all these other places.

Your book brought that up again, which is like how many of these places, the transportation that we have now is a result of the race question.

The fear through most of the post-war era was that black people would get on the train, take the train to Beverly Hills, steal people’s televisions, and then speedily escape. On the subway, which the whole concept is ridiculous if you think of just how big TVs were back in the day and that yes, they sold cars to black people as well, but it really couldn’t be decoupled from that fear of public transport equals desegregation.

One of the reasons that Marta finally passed after several referenda is that the MARTA system got black buy-in. Many of the East West lines routing decisions were changed from the original plans to better serve black neighborhoods.

They had the same suburban boom after the war, but they never decided to demolish their city centers in order to build those freeways. And that’s really the reason that public transport works so much better in Canada than it does south of the border.

So they didn’t build them through the center of the cities. We’ve talked about this a number of times on the show recently, but Megan Kimball’s book is really illustrative of the discussion that Eisenhower had with some of his advisors at the time that they were talking about why a lot of the highways were going through American cities.

And he was actually advised against it, and she went into the archives and found these discussions and notes from the thoughts that he had. People, the advisors around him that said, Hey, you need to build transit to get people between places. The cities are too dense for running a highway through. And the interesting part too was when this was going on, Nixon was on the ballot against Kennedy and so he didn’t wanna mess up his parties fortunes and obviously they lost to Kennedy. But it was interesting to see how politics played into that too. And I imagine that is a discussion and that goes throughout the discussions that you have in the book.

And it does.

And lest we get too romantic about neighborhoods that were demolished. My mother-in-law was a child at the time that she moved into one of these big X shaped towers that were built in New York City to replace tenements in Manhattan. And her parents had gotten a two bedroom apartment that’s a thousand square feet.

And she started crying because she thought that the entire floor would be coming into the apartment to use the bathroom because that’s how overcrowded these tenement buildings were. So it is useful to have that as a corrective because people really like living in city centers now. But at the time, it was associated with a specific type of urban poor.

And especially minority poor, whether it’s Filipinos in Echo Park, Los Angeles, or Jews in Boyle Heights of LA on the other side of downtown.

The Market Street Railway in San Francisco, the Detroit United Railway in Detroit were really treated as public enemy number one during the interwar period. Much the same way that the tech oligarchs have. Very few friends in the public eye these days. The railway and transit oligarchs of a century ago also had very few friends because if you think about it, you know the year is 1920.

And the automobile hasn’t really gone mainstream just yet. So if you wanna get around a city, your options are to walk, find somebody with a horse or pay the fair of the much hated transit monopoly. So in some sense, people like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler. Represented a going away from these private monopolies that dominated the regions.

So in Seattle, for instance, the Streetcar monopoly was also the electric company. Same thing in Atlanta, where Georgia Power, which is still the electric monopoly, ran the trains in other cities. The Street Streetcar Monopoly was deeply tied with something else like in Oakland, across the bridge from San Francisco.

The owner was. Something called the Realty Syndicate. They built hotels and suburban subdivisions, and that’s how they made their real money. They had very few friends as a result because they dominated so much of the metropolitan areas. And as part of this reaction, a lot of the country just decided to throw the baby out with the bath water.

If you are in. New York or San Francisco cities decided to open up their own transit companies to compete with the much hated monopolies and put them outta business. If you go to Seattle or Detroit, the city just bought the thing outright and nationalized it. And in other places like Los Angeles or New Orleans, the public’s decision was to grin and bear it.

Like when Uber first came to New York City. It was a revelation because you could get where you wanted to go. Like New York City, famously yellow cabs would not go to Brooklyn if you hail a cab, you would have to go through a whole dog and pony show in order to convince a cabby to go over the bridge, or you’d have to call.

A kind of sketchy car service and haggle with the driver to get over the bridge. Whereas Uber says, great, you put it into your phone, you say, I wanna go to Brooklyn. No mess, no fuss. You know what the fair is and you call it a day. And. It’s somewhat similar with the introduction of the automobile and for that matter, the bus where you weren’t reliant on, say, the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles a century ago because there was a competitor, a publicly owned bus service owned by the city of Santa Monica, which is now the big blue bus.

Or alternatively you could drive, you weren’t at the mercy of the Pacific Electric and you didn’t have to spend your money propping up this corrupt monopoly.

Because of this people were saving all of their resources. But it never really was something where these streetcar companies made a ton of money. They were combined with the electric company, they were combined with the real estate development. They were combined with a lot of stuff. And so it was thinking about it as a public service and that’s in the end why a lot of these cities purchased the rights or the properties of these systems.

But I find that fascinating as well, is that like we. Look back and think about, oh, the days of the streetcar and the streetcar suburb and the neighborhoods that existed, or ownership is how we should do this, and it should be run like a business. Which is a silly way of thinking about it. But I find that fascinating too, that these companies never really were on top of it.

And the Twin Cities example specifically was interesting because the people that wanted a profit just basically ruined it.

They stop every couple of blocks they run in mixed traffic. They’re not really a service improvement on a bus to make at grade rail work, you have to run it in its own lanes. You have to run long trains. You have to do. Basically what looks like light rail as opposed to the street cars in like the F market in San Francisco, which stops every couple of blocks.

So maybe I’m a little jaded in that perspective.

A street car. No. As opposed to like you could do it just as well with bendy buses, but even though SF chose to build that as a tourist attraction.

It was a great idea. Don’t get me wrong, especially as part of the urban revitalization that I grew up with, because I’m originally from sf, like things were a lot more. Sketch before the Embarcadero freeway was torn down before things really started getting cleaned up in the nineties. But at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily require rail to do that.

And for various reasons, Philly ended up using Streetcar for the bulk of their in city lines, and most of those lines that really should have been upgraded to carry some sort of subway surface route, like the ones that run to West Philly just never were.

With New York and Chicago for being one of the big three American cities. Philadelphia really does have that sort of legacy where they were, I think number four, number five, well into the 20th century, but for various reasons, they ended up getting lapped by DC and New York, and they don’t necessarily get treated as in the same league as DC and New York.

And. I’m not sure whether that’s because they just happen to be smaller than the DMV slash the tri-state area, or it’s because Philadelphia is between DC and New York, whereas Boston on the other hand has a very different personality. They don’t get overlooked nearly as much by, say, the national press in a way that Philly Philly sometimes gets skipped if the analogy holds.

I’ve been watching The American Revolution by Ken Burns and all these cities on the east coast get talked about and. What’s fascinating now is to see how important they were then versus how important they are now. And then also listening to colleagues talk about places like Baltimore where there’s a lot of folks who live in Baltimore and they’re talking about housing prices, et cetera, around the country, and they might not have the same perspective, and so they feel overlooked when we start talking about superstar cities and the housing crisis and things like that.

And it’s a little bit different in some of these other cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore. So I find that discussion interesting when we focus on these. Few cities. There’s others that could use a little bit of attention as well.

They did end up in some kind of post-industrial decline the way that say Buffalo or Detroit did in a way that didn’t really hit, say Boston or dc. Boston was never a major industrial center to begin with. Boston really peaked in the 1920s, and its population was largely stagnant and then began declining after the war.

Whereas Philadelphia and Baltimore hit their maximum population around 1950 if memory serves, and their decline was tied very deeply with the post-industrial era. And Boston, unlike those two, had that massive educational cluster, that massive hospital cluster, that as it turns out. Became a really big deal when the economy became centered around things like healthcare and high tech.

Like Philly has Penn and Temple and Baltimore as Hopkins, but it’s nothing like the cluster of Mass General Harvard bu, Boston College. MIT and all of the rest of the educational institutions in Greater Boston. So it’s not unfair to say that Boston is the world’s largest college town in a way that Philly and Baltimore use Penn and Hopkins as major economic engines, but they’re just one among many.

Yeah.

That’s fine. Like it would’ve been a mistake, for instance, to build out the Cleveland downtown. People mover the thing only ran in one direction. It didn’t serve a lot of the major destinations, and it would’ve been a wide elephant in a way that the Detroit people mover. Is a white elephant. It’s like it’s a cool thing to get on and ride around downtown Detroit, like it’s the Disneyland monorail, but it’s not a useful piece of transport infrastructure, and that’s very much in contrast to a place like Seattle say, where shooting down a full-blown subway network.

In the sixties and seventies was a major mistake because Seattle is well suited for public transit, and if they had received something like Bart or the Washington Metro 40 years before they actually built the link light rail, that would’ve greatly influenced the trajectory of Seattle. But Seattle in the 1970s was.

In deep trouble because of Boeing being in deep financial trouble, and it hadn’t really become the fashionable tech hub that it would ultimately become because of Amazon and Microsoft and the like. Yeah, it’s just fascinating ’cause I know that there’s a lot of times in history and even here in the Bay Area where you voted for something or something I voted for, and it never happened.

And that never really paid off. But it is a fascinating thing to think of. Had the Bay Area decided to merge together instead of becoming I think it’s 101 municipalities, theoretically, making up one metropolitan area.

Stuff. It’s funny when people talk about the transit agencies as well if you talk about regional connections, you could make, there’s always a discussion about whether one of the agencies is gonna get short shrift because transit in San Francisco is gonna get more resources than say, AC Transit or down in, in San Jose.

And so it’s interesting we’re still having that discussion because we’re gonna have that sales tax and the folks down in the southern end of the region weren’t quite sure if they were gonna sign on because they didn’t want to get short shrift of the money that might come from the funding that might happen if we pass the measure.

So it’s interesting to see those discussions. They start then and they continue feels like forever and endlessly.

Like the classical way to do it is just to create one agency. And merge all the others in, which is what they did in the past. But there’s actually something I find fascinating in the German speaking lands called the Fair Cares Bond, where there’s a regional governance board that sets Faires and controls the ticketing and coordinates the scheduling between different agencies so that you can have a free transfer between say, the Slovak railways to Broads lava, and the subway within the city of Vienna.

But. It doesn’t necessarily require one giant agency to run everything like say the New York MTA. You just need to have a coordination body that makes sure that everyone gets along.

The other thing is the Great Depression, right? And that impacted a lot of places as well. Just folks that were impacted, whether that was the money or the politics or whatever else, the change in the streetcar companies, et cetera. That was another fascinating turning point.

There could have been a major public infrastructure push to say, we’re not going to abandon all of these trolley lines. We’re gonna upgrade them and make them work, where the public just didn’t buy it. The public had no patience for that kind of thing. There was a city council vote in Los Angeles in 1948 where the Pacific Electric offered to sell the remnants of the system, which was still extremely extensive.

To the city of Los Angeles and the city would run all of the remaining lines upgraded with a subway through downtown, which would look an awful lot like modern light rail.

Right?

Or feel that way anyways.

And to us, a ratio of one car per four people is surprisingly low. That’s that’s the rate of car ownership that they have in Manhattan today. At the time that was considered the wave of the future.

My favorite city that I unexpectedly enjoyed was Cincinnati. Cincinnati is not a city that I thought would be on my list of, oh, this place is surprisingly cool. Like I would totally go back there because I spent time in each city doing the research over quarantine after I got my vaccine. And so I had a lot of time to just wander around and take in the.

Aura of all of these places. Cincinnati, I liked much more than I expected. Houston, I liked much more than I expected.

It’s not that it’s an honest to God city and their land use policy is remarkably good considering that the city was built out for the most part after the Second World War. Yeah. Just as a place that feels effortlessly cool and doesn’t try to front unlike say Dallas, where I did not particularly enjoy it, and the vibe of Dallas was much more a place that’s trying to chase.

Los Angeles or New York or whatever it is, it’s trying to follow whatever the cool trends are as opposed to Houston, where Houston is quite happy being Houston.

Oh yeah. It’s gross. So hot. Was so hot all the time when I was living there. Yeah, it’s fascinating like that you gravitated towards Cincinnati because it had, it was that great depression story. And the subway that they built but never used. And there’s still talk about it whether we, they should use that piece of infrastructure that they built so long ago.

The M 25 in London runs around the center of London. Nobody’s decided in London that it would be a good idea to run a freeway in front of Westminster Abbey. Like it’s just, it’s not a thing that. They should be doing. And in American cities, they said, yeah of course. It’s a great idea.

Let’s build a freeway down the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Or let’s build I 10 right through the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans. They just, they thought it was a good idea at the time because it was it was the wave of the future and. It was a way to get rid of poor people, minorities and poor minorities.

The powers that be of those cities are deeply invested in real estate locally in a way that in a lot of other places it just made sense to decamp for the burbs.

By and large, a lot of the public input and bureaucracy that characterizes modern American planning is not particularly useful for anything or anybody. It’s a sort of kabuki theater where the same three cranks claiming to speak for the people, show up and say, no, we couldn’t possibly have bus lanes on Geary Boulevard, for instance.

Yep. And this is not the actual will of the people because the people already had a say in this when they had an election. There. There is no better way to have a community consultation than to just have an election, and politicians should be able to enact their agendas. Like it shouldn’t have to require a million years to build, say, the Chinatown Subway or the second Avenue subway or the Wilshire Boulevard subway.

Because these are things that the public decided to tax themselves for. They elected politicians to get this stuff done. Yes, the politicians should be able to get stuff done as opposed to getting bogged down in the details with this type of endless procedure that goes nowhere. Yep.

I think that I often think about that the representatives that we elect and whether they are able to move forward things. Stuff here in San Francisco specifically about the Great Highway and sunset Dunes, the new park, and the recall of Joel and Gar.

He. Actually saw what the results of the election was, which is the whole city of San Francisco said, we wanna have this park. And so it happened. And so I think there’s a lot of people that just don’t like the results of elections, and so they’ll push back on that. But it’s also frustrating that we can’t just build a lot of these systems that we really want.

The other frustrating thing is that in the United States specifically we talk about this all the time, but if we’re gonna have votes on transit. Systems like these, why don’t we have votes on the highways and roads? Like why did we ever allow the state dots to be the ones that are the arbiters of picking where the roots were?

We decided that was something that we wanted and so nobody’s really pushed back on it. And so it’s interesting, look at it from that juxtaposition of we vote for transit systems, we don’t vote for roads.

Predate like the reconstruction of transit in the US and congestion is not really a political issue in the sense of left versus right in the states. There’s, there are questions of how do we deal with congestion, but it hasn’t really become politicized in the way that like if you wanna build a subway in Los Angeles, then black people will come to Beverly Hills and steal your television.

Like highways never got politicized in that sort of way, and I suspect it’s because so much of the experience of people’s daily lives is spent in a car.

They didn’t have to vote for that. That tore out whole neighborhoods already. There’s gonna be one that they’re trying to build at the state to run through a place that’s gonna be inundated with floodwaters in a number of years. You mean Route

I’m frustrated less with putting highways up for vote and more with having to put systems up to vote when that doesn’t have to happen for these road systems that we built their infrastructure. Projects, they were done by state dots and state dots now have this infrastructure where they can go and do a lot of stuff.

California has speed rails taking forever. I sometimes wonder if we just gave it to the state DOT and said, build a road there. They would’ve had it done by now. Yeah. Although I think this is a California specific problem as well, because in the Northeast, these types of referendums just don’t happen.