In many of the largest cities around the world, transportation is a mess. The citizens of Lagos, Jakarta, Sao Paulo and Rome spend too many of their waking hours in cars, barely crawling, or not moving at all. (The average speed of traffic in Midtown Manhattan has dropped to 4.6 miles per hour.) The social costs of this car-based transportation system — what economists call its externalities — are enormous. Over 1.19 million people are killed by cars every year, the equivalent of eight fully loaded jumbo jets going down every day, with no survivors. Cars cause cities to sprawl, which eats up agricultural land, and strains resources as the infrastructure for new suburbs are built. In the United States, the transportation sector — which is dominated by cars and trucks — has surpassed energy generation and construction as the leading source of carbon emissions.
Though the global population shows signs of heading for a plateau, the world’s cities continue to grow. Urbanization means the equivalent of a city with the population of New York is now added to the planet every two months. Cities are all about increasing human opportunity by reducing the space between humans, as well as their businesses, homes, schools, and cultural institutions. Cars and trucks — and there are 1.475 billion of them on Earth now — require vast amounts of that precious space. The simple truth is they barely fit into today’s cities, let alone into the megacities of the future.
Many people imagine that the solution to our transport woes will come from the bleeding edge of tech research. A magnetic levitation train, perhaps, like the one the Japanese have been working on at a test track in Yamanashi, which reached a top speed of 603 kilometers per hour (375 miles per hour) in 02015. Or maybe it will be a transit network organized around driverless cars, along the lines of the Waymo robo-taxis of San Francisco, but on a much larger scale. Or salvation could come from a combination of Elon Musk’s hyperloop, a kind of vacuum-tube train for intercity travel, or his Convention Center Loop, in which lines of Teslas run under the Las Vegas Strip in 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) of specially-built tunnels.
I believe the real future of transportation was launched in pre-Enlightenment France, by Blaise Pascal — he of the famous wager, that posited belief in God was a safer bet than non-belief — in the year 01662. After inventing the mechanical calculator, the philosopher turned his mind to the problem of traffic in Paris, which, with a population of half a million, was then the most populous city in Europe, and the most densely settled. The wealthy got around in private carriages, drawn by horses, which they paid vast sums to maintain. The poor walked. Pascal dreamt up a system by which “les petites gens,” the little people, could move, if not in as much comfort as the rich, then at least as quickly and reliably. His “carrosses à cinq sols” were horse-drawn carriages, each seating eight passengers, “infinitely convenient,” as Pascal described them in his appeal for a royal patent, and “leaving at regular times, even when empty.” For a fare of five sous, the carrosses carried passengers along five lines, on both sides of the Seine River. (A fare increase to six sous led to protests, and, after fifteen years, the service shut down.)
What Pascal had invented was fixed-route public transportation, which, in the twenty-first century, remains our best hope for keeping people moving within, and between, cities and regions. In the generations following Pascal, most of the basic problems of getting around dense settlements were solved. The omnibus, another French invention, put even more passengers into vehicles, some of them double-decked. Wagonways, in which wheeled vehicles are pulled in grooves, went back to the Romans, but starting in the 01830s, the railway, which put flanged steel wheels on steel rails, greatly reduced the amount of energy required to pull freight and passengers. Horses were replaced by steam trains. (The trains that ran through the tunnels of the London Underground, which in 01863 became the world’s first subway, were powered by coal.) Steam trains were in turn replaced by vehicles that drew electricity from third rails and overhead catenary wires, diesel locomotives, or diesel-electric hybrids.
By the time the first Model T Ford hit the streets in 01908, the basic problems of urban and inter-city transportation had been solved. The United States was on its way to becoming the world’s greatest railroad nation, building a network of a quarter million miles of tracks — ten times more than in Britain, the nation that built the first steam engines. In cities, elevated trains, cable cars, incline railways, and trolleys, most of them electric-powered, whisked people to jobs, schools, hilltop parks, and homes. On the eve of the First World War, a surprisingly extensive network of electric-powered interurbans was carrying 1.3 billion commuters a year beyond city limits, making extensive regional transportation available to all for a fare of just five cents.
First in the United States, and then in cities around the world, mass motorization flooded city streets with cars, gradually causing bulky trams, cable cars, and buses to slow to a crawl. Many people believe that General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil conspired to kill off streetcars, using a front company called National City Lines to replace steel-wheeled trolleys with rubber-tired city buses. (A closer look at court records shows that the representatives of what some scholars call “motordom” were indeed convicted of collusion, but only by secretly agreeing to buy GM and Mack buses after the streetcar lines were torn up.) The basic fact, however, is that in most cities streetcars, caught in a rising tide of privately-owned cars, had stopped working efficiently by the 01950s. The construction of airports and the Interstate Highway System, both of them publicly funded, killed off intercity rail just as cross-country diesel-electric trains regularly began to reach speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour.
Many of the proposed solutions to global urban transportation woes — apart, I suppose, for calls for Blade Runner-style flying cars — involve more-of-the-same thinking. In other words, think more privately-owned cars. Many of these schemes, I’ve noticed, come out of California, whose cities mostly grew after the coming of cars, and in lockstep with the spread of freeways. In such an automobile-centered landscape, a scenario in which the gas-powered automobile is replaced with electric self-driving cars, powered by solar and wind, seems like natural evolution. This ignores the fact that much of the electricity in the world still comes from coal or non-renewables, or expensive nuclear power plants, and that driving conditions are far from the fair-weather ideal found in Los Angeles or the Santa Clara Valley. Self-driving cars have trouble coping with winter weather and poorly-maintained lane markings where I live, in Montreal; imagine them trying to thread their way through the auto-rickshaws, scooters, and darting pedestrians of a Mumbai rush-hour.
The transport systems that have retained their efficiency in the age of the megacity are the ones that follow Pascal’s seventeenth-century paradigm: fixed-route public transportation, infinitely convenient, and leaving at regular times. To which I should add a fourth criterion: transit that runs on dedicated guideways, separated from street traffic. Subways and metros are the classic examples: because they run beneath the streets, they are immune to the congestion on the surface. Chicago’s “L”, which is elevated above lanes of traffic in the Loop, is the clanking, shade-throwing aboveground equivalent. City buses can work efficiently when they are given their own lanes: this is the idea behind Bus Rapid Transit, which carries millions of passengers a day in Istanbul, Guangzhou, Mexico City, and dozens of other cities in Asia and Latin America.
Since its invention over 350 years ago, public transport — particularly the rail-based, electric-powered kind — has had ample opportunity to incorporate incremental improvements that have only boosted its power to move people. GPS, computerization, video surveillance, and automatic platform doors allow for staggering throughputs at very low cost. I recently rode on London’s Elizabeth Line, which runs east to west on- 117 kilometers (73 miles) of lines, linking such major train stations as Paddington and Liverpool Street with Heathrow Airport. Platform doors, which prevent people or objects falling on the track, and a fenced-off route through the aboveground sections, allow trains to run safely, and so at greater frequencies: up to 48 trains per hour, each of them capable of carrying 1,500 passengers. Since it opened in 02022, congestion at other major stations has decreased, and the line is carrying 200 million people a year. (For contrast, Amtrak carries about 30 million passengers a year across the entire U.S.) One in seven rail journeys in Britain is now made on the Elizabeth Line.
Platform doors, which prevent people or objects falling on the track, and a fenced-off route through the aboveground sections, allow trains on the Elizabeth Line to run safely, and so at greater frequencies. Photos by the author
The Elizabeth Line, because it shares aboveground tracks with conventional trains, still has human drivers. But completely automated systems, like Vancouver’s Skytrain and Canada Line, Honolulu’s Skyline, and Montreal’s REM, already exist. They can run trains with headways of as little as sixty seconds, and, because the trains drive themselves, operating costs are strikingly low.
Older systems, like those in London, Paris, and Tokyo, have proved capable of responding to increasing demand, without having to be remade from scratch, because they’ve been able to rely on the funding that allows for regular upgrades. The goal of congestion pricing in New York was to take the tolls paid by drivers, and pour them into improving the city’s overstrained subway, still the world’s largest by number of stations. A similar system used in London channeled money into city buses, vastly improving performance and boosting ridership. Instead, in an abrupt about-face in June 02024, Governor Kathy Hochul killed the initiative just weeks before it was set to take effect, dashing hopes that cities like San Francisco and Chicago might use evidence of its success as a blueprint for their own traffic-busting congestion zones.
When people imagine a low-carbon, low-congestion future of driverless E.V.s, I nod my head in eager anticipation. But I’m not thinking about Tesla Tunnels, or electric F-150s, or self-driving robo-taxis. The electric vehicles I have in mind are the ones that have been around for over a century: trains (whether light- or heavy-rail), trolley buses, and metros. When you have a system like the Métropolitain or the Underground doing the hard work of moving people, there are fewer cars on the streets. That in turn makes neighborhoods more walkable, and people feel secure enough to opt for forms of active transport; both Paris and London have seen a huge spike in commuting by bicycle, encouraged by mayors who have built protected bike lanes. When you combine nineteenth-century electric traction with Pascal’s venerable seventeenth-century principle of fixed-route transit and the twenty-first century innovations that allow for automatic operation, you have a long-term solution for today’s transportation mess — a solution, in fact, for the centuries.
The challenge is not to get distracted by the purveyors of hyperloops and other vaporware, or those who say buying a new, improved, model of automobile will solve our problems. Urban history goes back at least eight thousand years, to the densely-settled proto-cities of the Neolithic, while the automobile has been an explosive factor for just over a century. From a long-term perspective, cars present a temporary problem, while public transport offers a sustainable solution.
