Americans have been commuting so long, and so far, that we have come to view transit solutions as moving tens of thousands of people at speeds of 50-60 miles per hour over distances of ten to twenty miles.
It doesn’t need to be that way. For over twenty years, 95% of my trips were under two miles, and this included higher education and professional employment. This wasn’t just a happy accident. The gas crisis of the early 70s reinforced my natural reluctance to enter the commuting relationship. What others spent on cars I spent on the higher costs of inner-city housing, and when I chose a career I chose one with multiple employers in the city core.
Transit for the person in town is not just about covering distances- it’s about being warm and dry and being able to read or, in our modern times, twitter. It’s also about building a lively streetscape.
When Jane Jacobs wrote her great tomes, old buildings were abundant and cheap. Seattle in the 70s and 80s was like that- cheap rents allowed the community to reinvent itself. Now our cities need to reinvent themselves again, radically reducing car usage in the urban core and going beyond liveable streets to highly desirable streets. But now there’s no free lunch!
The solution is capital investment in streetcars. In this setting, low speeds and short distances are a feature, not a bug.
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