Quote:
Originally Posted by FromSD
American federal, state and local authorities do everything they can to accommodate automobile use: low gas taxes, abundant parking, massive road infrastructure even in the largest cities. This is much less true in Canada, where urban freeways in particular, are much less common.
There was extensive disinvestment in U.S. public transit after World War II, but even after that changed in the 1970s, public transit in most places was relegated to those who couldn't drive or couldn't afford to drive. Americans think that public transit is for poor people, and because of stubborn class and racial divisions, that limits its appeal to "choice" riders further up the economic scale.
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Yes, this and I would also add that there's some historical context to why it is like this. The greatest American urban transit systems all began as privately owned companies. Most local and state governments (and certainly not the federal gov't) had no precedent for developing and maintaining public transit, and most never really developed good policy around transit expansions and improvements. OTOH, all levels of government have pretty robust policies and funding mechanisms for maintaining roads, and most of our roads are products of government planning. If the U.S. applied the same level of planning to public transit infrastructure as it does to roads then a lot more of our cities would have some of the best transit in the world.