It seems like the biggest questions non-Americans have for Americans is those of transportation. Why the fascination with cars? Why is your public transportation so terrible? Why doesn't anyone use trains?
Like everything in America, when you start talking in generalities, you're going to get in trouble. Some of us do use trains. Some of us absolutely hate cars. Some cities have fantastic public transportation and in some of those cities, owning a car is actually a liability.
But that's not the case for much of America.
If you're not on the east coast of America, and more specifically, in Boston, New York City, or Washington D.C., your public transportation options are terrible. Those three cities happen to be extremely compact with very high levels of population density. They got started early, when cars weren't a thing and anything that meant you didn't have to buy a horse or walk on your own two feet was pretty damn cool. They also got started early enough that there was pretty good infrastructure by the time the Ford Model T came along in 1908.
Remember, we're a pretty young country. While New York and Boston got their start in the mid-1600's, they're the oldest cities we've got. Few cities have significant structures that were built before the mid-1800's. While many cities started out the 1900's with trolley cars and public rail, few had the resources to build a subway. Even in cities with trolley systems, the network was small and not of high quality. When cars became affordable, there was a huge incentive to tear them down.
This is where I have to speak once again of just how huge our country is and how we've never lacked for space. New York City to Los Angeles is 4500 kilometers. Fargo, North Dakota to Brownsville, Texas is 2600 kilometers. The state of Wyoming is a little bigger than the whole United Kingdom, but it only has 576,000 people living in it. It can be a long way to anywhere and most of the land was empty when we found it -- or we made it empty pretty fast.
Our first railway linking the East and West coasts wasn't complete (until 1869)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#United_States]. Many cities weren't connected even as late as 1900. Because nearly everyone that moved West did so in pursuit of owning a large portion of their own land -- simply moving out there could give you (640 acres of land for free)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act] -- that meant that linking everything up by any kind of rail was problematic and extremely expensive. I'm mentioning all this because I want everyone to understand the state of our rail system and public transit at the dawn of the automobile.
Automobiles represented real freedom in a country where travel could be and often was, difficult. Having a car not only meant you were free, but also meant that you were a person who could afford nice things. It meant that you no longer had to wait for the trolley that didn't run on time and at long intervals. It meant you were no longer constrained by all the things that had traditionally kept people fairly close to home. In many ways, these feelings deified the automobile in American culture. I didn't help that as car prices were declining, America had started to hit its industrial stride. Suddenly, cars were available to everyone.
In return, we built roads. Roads were cheaper to build and maintain than rail, and if you needed a road to your property or to your neighbor's property, you just cleared a path. You didn't need a permit to tap into the existing road and your car worked equally well on the official road as it did on the impromptu path. Simple. Easy. At the same time, all the existing public transit needed repair and replacement.
It didn't make economic sense to continue to build out public transit that only a few people were going to use anyway, and of course, anyone of any means was going to have a car. So, roads continued to get built and railways and bus lines didn't. Public transit became the system you'd use if you were poor and couldn't own a car. In time, it became stigmatized in much of America.
The automobile manufacturers certainly played their part in making the automobile an American icon. They're not blameless. Flush with profit, they used their might to relentlessly market the automobile and destroy funding for public transit. However, they sold all this to a willing public and everyone really did believe that cars were the future. It's easy to look back and see how this was a mistake.
Today, we still haven't shaken a lot of those values. It doesn't matter if it's Two Lane Blacktop, Knight Rider, or The Fast and The Furious, the automobile is still king in American culture. We love our automobiles. We refuse to get rid of them, and we often own more than one. Everything, particularly as you move West, was built with the car in mind. Car ownership is designed to be as low cost as possible. For instance, my state charges less tax on car purchases than normal items. Taxes for registration are less than $100 a year. Gasoline remains cheaper than diesel and barely taxed compared to European countries. This has created a problem for mass transit and trains in particular, as there's little incentive to get rid of your car.
In America, rail is primarily used for freight. From what I'm told, it does a very good job of carrying freight. However, the majority of rail lines are not owned by the public, they are owned by the rail company that built them. That means a couple of bad things for carrying passengers. One, passenger trains always have lowest priority. If a freight train and a passenger train need to use the same rail, the freight train is going first -- even if the freight just got there and the passenger train has been waiting for hours. Doesn't matter. Two, the rail lines are primarily built for low speed freight trains. High speed rail is nearly impossible on existing lines. Three, destination points are often in the most industrial areas of town. These are not good areas of town to be in. Even worse, transit options from these areas to the areas of town you'll want to be in are extremely limited. Getting off a train with a bunch of expensive luggage and electronics in the worst areas of town really isn't a good idea and not many people are willing to brave it. As a result of all this, passenger rail tends to be clustered around a couple of routes that work well -- California and the Eastern seaboard -- and rail enthusiasts. Some people ride trains just because they enjoy riding the trains. The delays and the fact that it takes significantly longer than driving by car doesn't matter, because they're enjoying the ride. For the vast majority of Americans, rail isn't a realistic option.
That isn't likely to change in the near future. We have exactly one high speed rail system, primarily connecting three of our most robust cities for public transit: New York City, Boston, and Washington D.C. Still, the average journey time is seven hours from Boston to DC and costs about $100. On the same day, I can take an hour and a half flight for $20 more. This small rail line cost us billions to build. Connecting most of the major cities in the US by high speed rail represents a cost that's difficult to calculate and politically impossible to spend considering that all of those cities -- and more -- are more adequately served by car and plane. I'd personally love to see high speed rail linking just the major cities in Texas -- just a little too far to drive, a little too expensive to travel by plane -- but I can see that it would cost too much to develop, would likely cost as much as a plane to travel on, and still wouldn't solve my problem of needing a car once I'd reached my destination.
In the end, just about everyone in the US owns a car. At my high school, which was a small school in a small rural Texas town, even the poor kids had a car. It might not have been a good car, but it did run and they knew how to keep it running. If you're above absolute poverty, that's how you travel, even if you need to cover long distances. If you're not, you probably use a plane for travel more than six hours unless you really enjoy the cross country drive. If you decide to take a bus, you'll likely be dealing with a fair amount of homeless and mentally ill, so you'll probably only do it if's all you can afford. (Our lack of care for the homeless and the mentally ill is a subject of another post.) If you happen to be in a city fortunate enough to have a subway, it will be used by all. Trains, however, due to the high cost of tickets and inefficient schedules, tend to have riders who don't really need to take public transit.
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