Mass transit spreads the virus: Cars are safer

Randal O'Toole:

A growing body of research shows that mass transit is the major reason why the coronavirus has been so deadly in New York City. 

The New York urban area...provides 45 percent of all transit trips in the United States and, not coincidentally, has seen about 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

Despite this, transit advocates have already begun promoting their heavily subsidized form of transportation along with increased restrictions on auto driving—the safest form of travel during an epidemic—after the current pandemic is over. 

Years of propaganda have successfully demonized cars and urban sprawl despite the fact that these two interconnected phenomena have produced enormous benefits.

One hundred and ten years ago almost no one owned an automobile. Instead, streetcar systems had been built in every city in America with more than 15,000 people and most towns of 5,000 to 15,000. Yet the nickel fare that streetcars typically charged was too expensive for most, and as a result the majority of urban Americans still walked for most of their travel.

Most urban work was in factories and most factories were downtown. Few factory workers could afford to regularly ride streetcars, so they and their families lived in crowded tenements within walking distance of the factories. Rents were high, privacy was non-existent, and disease, crime, and other problems associated with dense living were common.

That changed in 1913, when Henry Ford introduced moving assembly lines to make his Model Ts. This allowed him to double worker pay and cut the cost of his cars in half. Little more than dozen years later half of all American families had a car. Many of them moved to the suburbs, where land was cheap and they could afford better housing.

Jobs moved to the suburbs too because factories that used moving assembly lines required lots of land. The River Rouge factory where Ford built Model As was as big as the Chicago Loop and bigger than every other downtown in America except New York City’s. Hub-and-spoke transit systems worked for downtown jobs, but they don’t work well for suburban factories, which is the main reason why transit commuting declined.

No one objected when wealthy people used steam trains to move to suburbs and commute to cities in the mid-nineteenth century. No one objected when white-collar workers used streetcars to move to suburbs and commute to cities at the turn of the twentieth century. When blue-collar workers used automobiles to move to the suburbs, however, suddenly the elites were outraged.

A backlash began in the 1930s and grew in the 1950s. Suburbs were sterile; they were boring; they were paving over farms, forests, and open space. All those people mucking up rural areas with their homes and cars should be “re-housed” in “great new blocks of flats,” as one urban planner proclaimed. As planning historian Peter Hall points out, critics of the suburbs were “all upper-middle class and the offenders were mostly lower-middle class.”

Automobiles were even more evil, wasting energy and killing people in accidents and through toxic air pollution. These objections to automobiles may have been valid fifty years ago, when cars were gas hogs, smog darkened city skies, and more than 50,000 people a year died in auto accidents. Since then, however, per mile of driving cars have cut energy consumption by more than 50 percent, air pollution by more than 95 percent, and auto fatalities by more than 75 percent. 

Today, cars and light trucks are more energy efficient than transit and urban driving results in fewer fatalities per billion passenger miles than light rail or commuter trains.

Despite these improvements, critics of autos and suburbs still emphasize (and exaggerate) their costs while ignoring their many benefits...

Automobiles and suburbs have helped make the United States one of the wealthiest nations in history. Automobiles extended mobility to Americans of almost every income level and are becoming safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient every year. 

Suburbs made housing affordable for the working class and are no threat to farms, forests, or open space; in fact, they are an important source of open spaces in the form of large, bio-diverse yards. 

It’s time to end the vendetta against the automobile and suburbs and recognize them for what they are: efficient, egalitarian, and in many ways beneficial to our social and natural environments.

See also Coronavirus lessons: Density, mass transit, bureaucracy and censorship kill and The role of subway travel in an influenza epidemic.