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

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 inThe 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, Bo...