Some Simple Ideas For Improving Urban Transportation
These fixes won’t take years and millions of dollars to implement.
I could watch that video of Copenhagen on a loop for hours. It’s like witnessing an urban ballet. But there isn’t a city in the United States that is on a par with Copenhagen when it comes to transportation.
In researching this piece, it was infuriating how awful mass transit in the United States compared to the rest of the world. It’s embarrassing to try to put even our best transit cities in the same league as mediocre ones in Europe and Asia.
Before any American city becomes the next Copenhagen, there’s a ton of work to be done and a host of countervailing forces working against progress.
Funding for public transit improvements is at the mercy of the federal government and state legislatures, which at this point in time are mostly pretty hostile to anything that doesn’t involve automobiles. There are also regional interests (i.e. suburbs) that advocate only for getting people into and out of the urban…
