Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight

The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen

Paperback

Series: Historical Studies of Urban America

Transportation General20th Century United States HistoryUnited States Politics

ISBN10: 0226836622
ISBN13: 9780226836621
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Sep 25 2024
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.07
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A potent re-examination of America's history of public disinvestment in mass transit.

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way.

Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy-all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding.

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