Why urban transport looks different across the Atlantic

In Europe, we call it ‘public transport’. In North America, it’s called ‘public transit’. But the divergence runs deeper than language. Over a century ago, the two regions were neck-and-neck in developing urban train networks. Since then, their trajectories have sharply split: American cities quickly became car-centric, while European cities built more public transport, but not without their own car-related challenges. No matter where you look, urban mobility still has a long way to go, which is where UMX experts come in. 
UMX spoke with urban transport researcher, policy advisor, and trainer, Paul Barter, who authored our free online course Fundamentals of Public Transport: Key Components for Success, where you can learn how to improve public transport in your city with real-life examples from cities around the world. He has taught at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and advised international organisations such as the World Bank and German International Cooperation Organisation (GIZ), and you can hear him talk about public transport and car culture in several videos from UMX videos.

Timing growth with transport

To understand the public transport system in your region, you need to track where and when the city’s money for expansion was invested. Many cities invested in growth during the late 19th and early 20th century when urban development went hand-in-hand with public transport development like trains as opposed to cars. Paul explained, “If your city was lucky enough to grow rapidly in that era, it tended to grow in dense corridors structured around public transport.”

Expanding the urban rail network triggered a feedback loop that boosted ridership. “The walkable and mixed-use neighbourhoods that were built around the stops and stations,” Paul continued, “made the public transport convenient.” And it wasn’t limited to just North America. In Sydney, Paul noted how “the city’s subcentres of activity, like shopping districts and offices, were clustered around railway stations,” even if the surrounding areas of the city were eventually car-based.

However, cities that became wealthy slightly later, when car ownership then began to surge in the 1920s-1930s, experienced a different phenomenon entirely. Paul pointed to Western U.S. Canadian, and Sun Belt cities: “Trains and trams were still the main modes of transport, so they invested much more than anyone else.” For instance, Los Angeles’ Pacific Electric was the world’s largest urban railway network in the 1920s. Yet these newer, smaller cities grew far less compact: “They could just build and build because they had the space and money to invest,” Paul explained. Ironically, public transport enabled sprawl, priming these cities for cars. Planners then overlooked the existing networks, favoring highways both within and beyond city centres. “They didn’t see a need to control cars, and in a way, they created the conditions where it was easier for cars to flood into cities.” Flood in they did: Vehicle ownership per household doubled from 1925 to 1955.

Private cars vs. public transport

A handful of American cities, like Boston and New York, tried to serve both cars and public transport. Paul said that in those cases, “The outer areas turned into car areas, but the older inner areas managed to survive as public transit-oriented places because they had railways that were immune from traffic.” Yet that immunity was only reserved for rail passengers; everyone else was stuck. “People could still get to their jobs by train,” Paul noted, “but there were terrible problems with pollution, congestion, and parking. Ever since there’s been a big fight to claw back some livability in the central areas of those cities.” 

In the mid-20th century, European cities couldn’t expand like North American ones due to limited space and funds. “Europe was rich by world standards, but relatively poor compared to the Australian cities and the Western American cities,” Paul said. “They had public transport, but it didn’t spread out into the countryside at huge distances like in Los Angeles.” Paul added, “In some ways, it’s a blessing in disguise not to be rich at a certain moment in history.”

European cities battled with cars earlier and more successfully because they remained compact and structured around public transport. In the 1960s, as car ownership surged in Western Europe, traffic and parking crises arose faster than in North America, prompting many European cities to limit cars in their dense centres.  “It only took 10 years for them to realize it wasn’t working,” Paul reflected. Already by the mid-1970s, the fight to limit cars, price parking, and improve public transport was in progress in many cities all over Europe. Just look at the major public transport feats and facelifts around that time in cities like Vienna, Amsterdam, and Paris. “There’s always a fight and it’s never easy,” Paul said, “but these political battles arrived before Europe’s cities could be reshaped very much by car-focussed planning, allowing visible benefits, such as people-friendly public spaces and improved mobility options, to emerge relatively quickly.”

Whose (bottom) line is it anyway?

Unfortunately, the public transport gap between North American and European cities continues to widen. There are many reasons why but one of the key reasons is cost: Most European countries get much more bang for their buck when building mass transit than American cities do. As Paul put it, “In Spain, they can build 100 kilometers of public transport, but for the same money in New York, Canada, or the UK, they can only build maybe 10 or 20 kilometers.” 

Fortunately, for folks in sky-high-cost cities there’s an entire initiative called the Transit Costs Project dedicated to detecting ways that relatively rich countries like the U.S. can get more mileage for a fraction of the cost. For example, their case study on New York City’s Second Avenue Subway and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) found that ”uncertainty and a lack of leadership and funding certainty at the state, local, and agency level enables the MTA’s costs to outstrip those found in Istanbul, Italy, and Stockholm.” (One of the project’s team members is Marco Chitti, a Fellow in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute; you can watch his interviews with Paul in our free UMX course.)

In a similar vein, another factor that can drive up costs is an overreliance on private consultants over in-house expertise. Paul pointed out that “Spanish transit systems often contract with the private sector, but it’s the government authority who manages the project. They design the contracts in such a way to encourage low cost and they can spot any cost-raising shenanigans.” The difference is evident in the output. While several transport projects are going on at the same time in, for example, Barcelona or Madrid, most U.S. cities only build a new transit line “once in a blue moon,” he said.

Upskill in public transport

Wherever you are in the world, you can tap into the best practices for better transport when you take Fundamentals of Public Transport: Key Components for Success, a free online course that Paul authored with UMX. It’s loaded with case studies, videos and interactive quizzes, making it one of our most robust and popular offerings — with good reason! Start now to steer your city toward smarter, more sustainable mobility.