Ever since I was young, mass transit has fascinated me. It started simply with a love of watching trains as they thundered by and expanded into a fascination with the web of transit lines that added a layer of complexity to the map of New York City, my hometown.

These lines are the city’s blood vessels, connecting people and places of all types. As more places replicate New York’s transportation success, mass transit is coming to define the modern metropolis. People are moving away from the private automobile as the primary mode of transport, and urban areas across America are being swept up in the largest boom in transit construction since the turn of the last century. Cities like Denver and Dallas are starting from scratch, while others — like my hometown — work to shape an older network to newer needs. Yet it is not just the chosen mode of conveyance in these metropolises that is changing. The flows of people are changing, and with them, patterns of living, patterns of work, and, to an extent, patterns of thought. The compartmentalized, decentralized, car-based city is reconsolidating and becoming more complex as people change their ways of life in response to transportation. This newfound density is altering physical environments, economic networks, and social interactions as we all become part of an intricate urban network.

For almost seven decades, starting in the 1920s, the car dominated the perceived future of transport. Regarded as a manifestation of freedom, cars became a common mode of transportation for Americans in the mid-20th century, leading to massive urban decentralization as the upper and middle classes were equipped to flee cities for the suburbs. This created a nation of parallel universes, in which interactions with others were optional. People began to live in detached, single family homes, from where they would drive to work in private cars. Maybe they would stop at a supermarket or outlet store somewhere along the way, but even there, the only person they ever had to interact with in their purchase of items ranging from paper towels to cabbage was the cashier. This, of course, contrasts with classical urban life, in which people lived in apartments, took trolleys or trains to work, labored alongside others in relatively cramped offices, and did their shopping at the myriad unique stores that once lined commercial streets from coast to coast.

Workplaces changed, too. As people moved away from cities, their jobs also began to relocate, creating the phenomenon of the suburban office campus. Once the epitome of corporate modernity, these establishments quickly populated suburbia from the 1950s to the 1970s, allowing office workers to both live and work in the hinterland, never having to set foot in the urban core. All across America, companies fled their seemingly antiquated office towers for a leafy, exclusively car-accessible “paradise,” where they would be both closer to their workers and able to use cheap, plentiful land.

But when this suburbanization seemed almost complete, a reversal began. In the late 1980s, urban cores rose from their ashes; they finally surpassed the suburbs in terms of development after the Great Recession. As the decades of urban decline ended, people and jobs began to trickle back into the dense centers of cities either out of necessity — people following their peers, and companies following their workforce — or out of a desire for that more cosmopolitan atmosphere that the suburbs lack. People do not want to be chained to their car, living in the cultural isolation of suburbia; people want to be around others, to be able get around without an automobile, and to absorb the cultural diversity of our urban cores.

Economic geographies have changed also, both causing and resulting from this resurgence in mass transit, as increasing numbers of suburbanites return to working in the city and companies consolidate their once disseminated operations. Over the past decade or so, corporations have been leaving their wooded, bucolic office campuses in the suburbs for office towers in the city. As people grew dissatisfied with suburban life and businesses realized the failings of the dispersed model, companies and capital began to trickle back into cities, reinvigorating urban business districts. To get to and from their relocated jobs (and possibly their relocated houses), many workers have turned to public transit, thereby increasing demand and causing transport providers to expand service. This growth further eases transport between the hinterland and the core, propagating growth.

The return to density creates a complex economic structure, forcing companies to find ways to streamline their business and labor practices to deal with the loss of individualized space — namely, to interact. Furthermore, it creates a new type of office worker. No longer is the future white-collar employee seen to be driving to work from a veritable mansion on the suburban fringe, but instead riding a bus or train to work from an apartment.

Just as the car redefined suburbia in the mid-1900s, today mass transit is reshaping its physical face, adding complexity to its once more uniform appearance. In response to societal shifts over the last twenty years, suburban developers now try to imitate cities in the heart of the sprawling suburbs, creating smaller, satellite cities to feed the growing core. This density stems from a need to take advantage of transit services without having to drive or walk long distances, which necessitates living within, say, half a mile of the station. Obviously, only a small number of people can live in this mile-wide circle if builders follow conventional suburban planning patterns, so instead, transit-focused communities are constructed to accommodate larger numbers of people. From Seattle to Nassau County, the suburbs are slowly contracting into dense settlements around stations or terminals, creating a markedly different landscape. In areas that were once vast plains of centerless sprawl, focus points have developed, downtowns have reformed, and the car has been on the wane. I have seen this change, watching towers rise from subdivisions, congregating around train stations and terminals in Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey. Transit systems create a second network, a second planning paradigm, both separate from and complementary to roads, thereby adding complexity to the urban landscape.

Finally, public transportation has social implications that tectonically alter our interactions with others. Automotive life created a country of millions of bubbles, each going about its life by its rules and with as little interaction with others as possible. From the detached single family house in a sea of sprawl, to the corporate campus with thousands of individual offices, to the sprawling, automated shopping centre, the car created a world of parallel existences. Moreover, participating in this culture required the means to purchase a car and a suburban abode, excluding the working poor and causing unprecedented geographic inequality.

Public transit changes this equation. On commuter trains, buses, light rail cars, or subways, everyone sits in the same seats, shares the same vehicle, and has to coexist with others regardless of socioeconomic position. When I ride the subway, I mix with people from every walk of life and from all over the globe, and do so respectfully. Public transit is the great equalizer. Our microcosms are forced to combine, to interact, and to become a part of something larger. And they have to do so every day.

Transit is so much more than a means of travel. It is a tool of economic change, social justice, and civic reinvention. By forcing awareness of others, by creating a forum for a showcase of difference, it creates empathy. In a time when we too often lack this very compassion, transit can create it organically, without the pains of manufacturing it. Not only is mass transit revolutionizing the way in which we live and work, but it is also revolutionizing thought. It truly is remaking America.

Sources:

“Briefing Report #3: Case Studies for Transit Oriented Development.” Prepared by Reconnecting America for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. March 2009. http://www.fltod.com/research/general_tod/case_studies_for_tod.pdf

Frizell, Sam. “The New American Dream Is Living in a City, Not Owning a House in the Suburbs.” Time, April 25, 2014. http://time.com/72281/american-housing/

Mozingo, Louise A. Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.

McDonald, John F. Postwar Urban America: Demography, Economics, and Social Policy. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Schwartz, Nelson D. “Why Corporate America Is Leaving the Suburbs for the City.” New York Times, August 1, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corporate-america-is-leaving-the-suburbs-for-the-city.html

Sisson, Patrick. “The New American Suburb: Diverse, Dense, and Booming.” Curbed, October 12, 2016. http://www.curbed.com/2016/10/12/13255596/suburb-urban-planning-millennial-immigration-report-baby-boomer

Wogan, J.B. “Why Companies Are Moving Back Downtown.” Governing, August 2016. http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-economic-development.html