Transit enthusiast Taras Grescoe, 45, has never owned a car. “I was always trying to make a life without a car,” says the veteran travel writer, who lives in Montreal. “It’s a challenge and it makes you look at things differently.”
In his new book “Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves From the Automobile” (Times Books), Grescoe takes the reader from Shanghai and Bogota to New York and Los Angeles on a cultural tour that’s too entertaining to qualify as wonky treatise, yet too smartly researched for mere travelogue. Each chapter is an engaging pocket history of a city’s love/hate — but mostly love — relationship with mass transit.
Atlanta is barely mentioned, but in a recent interview, Grescoe talked about the potential of Atlanta’s transit “bones” and his feeling that the world is embarking on a golden age of public transportation.
Q: You say it’s a golden age for transit. Do you feel that as you travel?
A: Definitely. In Europe and Asia, they never gave up on transit. Even though they developed highway systems, they always kept building their subways and metros. In Shanghai they built a subway the size of New York’s — bigger than New York’s now — in only 15 years. What’s really interesting, what’s happening in the United States right now, is we’re seeing de-motorization: We’re actually seeing people buy fewer cars.
Q: You say middle- and upper-class people might be willing to abandon cars and airliners for rail, especially high-speed rail. Really?
A: In some of the richest places I’ve been to, in Tokyo and Copenhagen, I’ve seen well-off people giving up on cars altogether and riding bicycles and taking the train. That’s due to a number of reasons. It’s starting to happen in the United States. It’s mostly manifest in places that already have legacy transit systems, like New York and Chicago.
Q: That’s not happening here yet.
A: In Atlanta, there’s hope because you have a great historic core, but much of the postwar growth, the suburban and exurban growth, happened in the age of the automobile. So it’s been a challenge. You have about 500,000 transit boardings a day on the whole system. Montreal is a little smaller than Atlanta, but it has 2.5 million boardings a day.
Q: Aside from Portland, name some other progressive transit cities in the U.S.
A: There are dozens of cities building light rail in the United States. Among them: Denver, Salt Lake City, Honolulu. I question the one in Phoenix. It cost more than $4 billion, but the trains run pretty much empty. They might have gotten more bang for their buck out of an expanded rapid bus system. Sometimes people just fall in love with the toys and the technology.
Q: What’s impressive about what Los Angeles is doing?
A: As a freeway city, L.A. worked pretty well in the ’60s, but they just hit the wall when it came to congestion. Everybody’s done the math; they can’t keep on going this way. Now they’re building [rail] to Santa Monica and the beach.
Q: Will the U.S. ever see high-speed rail?
A: California is having trouble getting funding, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the line linking San Francisco to Los Angeles was done in 10-15 years.
Q: You believe that’s a good thing.
A: The U.S. was the world’s great railway nation up until the 1920s. Amtrak’s seeing record ridership right now. People who have ridden the good trains, like the Acela [in the Northeast], know that it’s a great way to go. They’ll pay a premium because they can work on their laptops. They don’t have to go through the security lineups [of airlines] and listen to endless announcements. And they’re downtown to downtown. We need more of that.
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