Here’s an interesting nugget on private investment in transportation infrastructure before the rise of the interstate highway system:
In the early 20th century, every town of more than 5,000 people was served by streetcars, even though real household income was one-third what it is today. By 1920, metropolitan Los Angeles had the longest street-railway network in the world. Atlanta’s rail system was accessible to nearly all residents. Until 1950, our grandparents and great-grandparents did not need a car to get around, since they could rely upon various forms of rail transit. A hundred years ago, the average household spent only 5 percent of its income on transportation.
How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way.
These developers included Henry Huntington, who built the Pacific Electric in Los Angeles; Minnesota’s Thomas Lowry, who built Twin City Rapid Transit; and Senator Francis Newlands from Nevada, who built Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Railway up Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle in the 1890s. When Newlands got into the rail-transit business, he wasn’t drawn by the profit potential of streetcars. He was a real-estate developer, and he owned 1,700 acres between Dupont Circle and suburban Chevy Chase in Maryland, land served by his streetcar line. The Rock Creek Railway did not make any money, but it was essential to attracting buyers to Newlands’s housing developments. In essence, Newlands subsidized the railway with the profits from his land development. He and other developers of the time understood that transportation drives development—and that development has to subsidize transportation.
After the Second World War, federally funded highways slowly supplanted this system, creating a windfall for a new batch of developers.
This isn’t dispositive by any means, but it definitely lends credence to the idea that walkable neighborhoods and shared transportation would fare a lot better in the absence of government subsidies for driving.
(Via Friedersdorf’s new blog at The Atlantic)
It’s not just about govt subsidies. Rail was much faster back then and roads sucked. From the blog Broken Sidewalk which covers urban development issues for my city:
“A century ago, if you were travelling outside of the center city, you wanted to be on a train. Just take a look at Frankfort Avenue up above from 1910. The dirt turnpike is muddy and full of potholes and would likely have been an unpleasant ride in a wagon or early automobile. Luckily for Louisvillians past, a state of the art interurban train ran parallel to the road providing a quick, reliable, and smooth ride out into the far reaching hinterlands.
These commuter trains could speed you in and out of Louisville at 65 to 89 miles per hour, breezing past motorists stuck in the mud. Imagine the convenience today of traveling nearly 90 mph out to St. Matthews, Lyndon, or Anchorage from a dense and thriving core city.”
http://brokensidewalk.com/2009/12/08/bad-roads-once-made-transit-very-attractive/
The road pictured in the post is now a very heavily used 4-lane artery in our city. So the choice was crappy dirt road in a Model T or a train that went 65-90 MPH. Technology rendered the trains obsolete, not government subsidy. Most inter-urban railroads disappeared before govt subsidy of roads.Report
@Mike at The Big Stick:
Its worth noting that train speeds have declined in the past hundred years. The Acela, America’s fastest passenger train, takes people from Boston to DC at the exact same speed that people could travel that route in 1910. It’s not just that our roads have gotten better: it’s that the government also made the conscious choice to disinvest in rail transit.Report
@carlos the dwarf, I’m all in-favor of more investment in heavy rail and regional passenger rail. I just hate to see efforts to get interurban rail into cities that won’t support it.Report