A Member of the One Percent

(No, not that One Percent)

There’s a new crop of one-percenter’s in our nation. Not the one percent who hold ninety percent of the wealth. Rather, a distinctly different group. The one percent who hazard to ride on public transportation. We represent a complete reverse from the turn of the last century, when ninety-nine percent of all travel was on public transit.

Public transit use has been in free-fall for the past 120 years, except for an uptick during World War II when Americans actually modified individual behavior for a perceived greater good. How quaint!

Once the war was over and the consumer economy developed full steam, public transit kept slip-sliding away. The reasons are legion: increased affluence, our love affair with the automobile, disinvestment in streetcars, increased investment in pavement, Madison Avenue’s persistent trumpet of autonomy, the Interstate Highway System, demolition of urban neighborhoods, fossil fuel subsidies, railroad decay.

For most of the 2000’s, public transit use hovered around two percent of all vehicle trips. Most American cities of any size had some sort of subway, streetcar, or bus system, though one-third of all public transit trips occurred in New York City alone. Virtually all systems lost money. Large, older, dense cities like Boston and Chicago, even D.C. and San…