Mass transportation will never work
By: Hugh Brennan
I have a confession. I love cars. Especially really fast, really beautiful cars. Having just done my stint at the car show in New York I feel like sharing.
We’ve got it all wrong. The prevailing wisdom is that cars are some sort of mechanical scourge, a blight upon the land. The scribbling elites never refer to “the American love affair with the automobile” without a condescending sneer.
Promoters of mass transit and urban planning view drivers with all the moral superiority that nonsmokers view smokers or the hyper-slim view the stretch-pants crowd.
What’s left out of all this elitist chattering however is the basic logic of the automobile as a transit system.
Mass transit is bound by specific schedules and routes which can only go where sufficient numbers of riders can be found. Mass transit is so expensive that it can only work where there are masses of riders with common destination and departure points.
Our cars can take us anywhere there is pavement at any time. The infinite combination of destinations and schedules equates to a freedom of movement previously unparalleled in human history.
Every American teen-ager has realized that sudden expansion of autonomy granted by the acquisition of a driver’s license.
The political elites who either live in the high-rise cities or are driven about in taxpayer supplied cars are constantly on the hunt for ways to break us of our auto-addiction.
Every time the gas prices increase there is the predictable commentary that we are paying too little as it is and we should double the gas price through taxation to force conservation — little pity here for the workingman with a long commute here.
There has also been a decades-long effort to make the driving experience sufficiently miserable till it reaches the level where the train or bus ride seem less miserable in comparison.
The chief method is to underbuild the road net. In the last 25 years the number of road miles driven has doubled, but the available miles of roadway has only increased 7 percent!
If you think it’s getting more crowded on the highway now just wait. This census will show a population brushing up against that magic 300 million mark.
In 20 more years we will hit between 350 million and 375 million, and in 50 years the half-billion mark. Each and every one of these people will want to drive. Each and every one will want the freedom of movement the car conveys.
The amount of congestion we will tolerate before being separated from our personal freedom machines is far in excess of what we have now. Look at the situation world-wide where the traffic in cities from Mexico to Japan makes ours look like a breeze.
We should stop pretending that mass transit makes sense for most of the country. Where it works, and New York City’s subway is the most successful example, it should be supported and encouraged, but where it is uneconomical and underutilized, we should stop trying to push sand uphill, and work on rationalizing our road system.
Transportation planning is land planning. We in Jersey are guilty of a schizophrenic approach. Some agencies of government are busy spending tax dollars doing their best to steal established businesses away from New York, while others are buying endless studies of the negative impact the activities these businesses generate have on our environment and transportation net.
Corporate campuses and the residential and retail centers that service their workers spin outward with centrifugal force from the old centers, abandoning the old dense rail and road net and overstressing the fragile web of rural and farm roads in the new areas.
In the last three decades we in New Jersey have been in the forefront of the new trend in commuting.
Where most of us who were raised in the old, inner ring of suburbs, had parents who commuted by train to a central city core, we now live in one suburban county and commute-via car-to jobs in the same or another suburban county.
We live our lives in the horizontal world of the automobile not the vertical world of train-served city.
A benevolent tyrant would never allow the current process to continue. If we really want mass transit to work, we must force office, major retail and government builders to concentrate their efforts in the old centers where the transportation nodes already exist.
Look at the map. Newark has the most amazing confluence of rail, road, airport and deep-draft docks. Road and rail lines radiate outward from this major center.
Yet the center goes begging for projects while we cover some of the richest farmland in the world with acres of anonymous glass boxes.
The same is true on a lesser scale of Trenton, Camden and Patterson.
Whatever the social problems of these towns, it is the availability of relatively cheap building sites in the countryside, and the political impotence of home-rule and state government before the legal and lobbying power of the developers, that robs us of the obvious benefits to both the cities and the suburbs of private redevelopment of the core areas.
A state plan with teeth would create value in the urban centers and take development pressure off the suburban and rural towns.
It’s time to grow up and stop pretending that diamond lanes, increased tolls, tougher emission standards or higher gas prices are going to take drivers out of their cars in the most suburban state in the country.
And a beautiful new car is fun.
Hugh Brennan is a free-lance writer who lives in Hillsborough.