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At the time, it was celebrated as progress, both for publicly owned systems (Detroit, Seattle, Miami) and privately owned systems (Dallas, Denver, LA). 12/

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And as for the GM streetcar conspiracy... there wasn't one. GM-affiliated National City Lines was swooping in and shutting down trolley companies at a time when *everyone* was shutting them down. 11/

last day of trolley service in ann arbor, mi

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The Interstate Highway Act and the suburbanization boom of the 1950s basically sealed the deal, by making the car and the expressway the primary means of transport nationwide. 10/

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Good government progressives of the era commonly pushed for publicly-owned transit infrastructure. In my hometown of SF, @sfgov.sf.gov set up its transit authority (Muni) in 1912 to fight the hated Market St. Railway. 7/

patch showing muni as "the people's system"

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For example: the little caption of this 1890s cartoon shows the mayor of Chicago fighting a bill backed by the transit monopoly with a caption reading "to the people belong the streets." 6/

That means that everyone relied on trains to get around - and the robber barons owned the trains. Widener, the Philly transit oligarch, also co-founded national monopolies in tobacco (American Tobacco), steel (US Steel) and shipping (International Mercantile Marine). 4/

In 1925, cars were rare. LA had the most cars of anywhere in America and even then only 1 in 4 households had one. By this point the Ford Model T had been around for almost two decades. 3/

Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 02/09/2026

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the evil oligarchs that dominated American life were transit barons. Most of them are largely forgotten today, but in their day men like Peter Widener, Henry Huntington, and Charles Yerkes were as despised as Elon Musk today. /2

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Modern Japanese rail companies are also excellent at this, because they combine transport and real estate development as a matter of course. No Japanese railway would ever pass up the opportunity to run lines where the passengers are.

screenshot showing that the keio corp. in tokyo both runs transit and develops real estate

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 02/09/2026

There's a huge opportunity for Kroenke here to redevelop the parking lots around Angel Stadium, and it's already a public transit hub. He already did this once with the Hollywood Park redevelopment, and the demand is certainly there.

angel stadium from the air relative to the train station

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 02/09/2026

Nice try, UCF, but still not as cool as the Tokyo Giants' individual player bento box specials. (pic from longweekendwanderlust.com)

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 31/08/2026

The bill is good, having different standards for unincorporated towns and villages/cities is not a smart idea, though. About half of Nassau is unincorporated, and even more of Suffolk. If this passes I fully expect shenanigans like the ones they had in suburban LA.

a map of suburban towns and villages on long island

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 14/08/2026

Building copy-pasted clusters of ADUs like Samara is doing, is essentially recreating the bungalow courts that were commonly built in 1920s California. There really is nothing new under the sun.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 14/08/2026

Lots of things don't work by simple supply and demand - but with housing, at a metropolitan level, it 100% does. 5/

the midwit meme - the idiot and the genius say to build more housing to solve the housing shortage, the midwit has a laundry list of explanations

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 11/08/2026

There's also one additional wrinkle that's Philly-specific here: The Philly transit unions are the most militant and aggressive in the country, and will strike at the drop of a hat. The biggest SEPTA union, Local 234, will absolutely strike over this.

SEPTA’s relationship with its unions has never been good, and
Philadelphia’s transit unions are unusually strike-
prone. From 1970 to 2022, SEPTA unions have
gone on strike 12 times— that is, once every five
years or so. For comparison, New York has had
only three strikes in that time, and Chicago, two.

Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 11/08/2026

There's a much better case for self-driving buses than self-driving cars. Bus authorities have dedicated maintenance staff, routes are fixed, and buses are extremely efficient at using street space. When the tech is mature, I fully expect there to be a brutal fight with the transit unions.

a picture comparing the amount of road space required to transport 70 people by bike, bus and car

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In contrast, Japanese land use laws and regs have always allowed small, non-nuisance-causing commercial uses to be mixed with homes, and it's why they have all these cool, quirky neighborhood businesses. (hat tip urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japa... for the diagram) 9/

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This really threw the baby out with the bath water, because small neighborhood grocery stores and restaurants are a Good Thing. 8/

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A century ago, Boyle Heights in LA had working-class Jews, Japanese and Mexicans; the Lower East Side in NYC had poor Italians, Irish, Jews and Chinese. You can bet that the city council didn't try to ban factories there! (pic: the old Breed Street Synagogue in LA, now vacant) 6/

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Part of the reaction to these horrific tenement conditions was to physically separate industrial, residential and commercial uses by establishing zoning laws, which is the norm today in America. 4/

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This loose regulation also enabled the worst excesses of the tenement era. For example, these are cigarmakers rolling cigars in their homes in the late 1880s in New York City. This is full-on industrial production. It's a far cry from the type of remote email jobs you see today. 3/

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/08/2026

A hundred years ago it was completely normal for American buildings to allow both commercial and residential uses - even in the smallest towns. For example, this is a ~1920 example from Keystone, West Virginia, population 176. Offices on the first floor, apartments above. 2/

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En Madrid, la M30 pasa alrededor del centro urbano, tal como la M25 en Londres, y el bulevar periférico en París, pero no hay autopistas que crucen el centro. No es así en EEUU. Construyeron autopistas que cruzan todas nuestras ciudades, incluso Manhattan.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/08/2026

As such, it shouldn't be THAT surprising that LA (and most other cities) became such car towns - because people had spent decades subject to the whims of the Worst People in the World. (Political cartoon is of the traction barons being swept out of Chicago City Hall in 1905.) 6/6

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 06/08/2026

Cities might also use a combination of these strategies. For example, in greater LA, the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus and Culver CityBus were founded to bypass the hated Red Cars. (The Pico-Rimpau terminal was the transfer point, just as it is today.) 5/

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as max notes, the beloved victorians were copy-pasted apartment buildings, built at industrial scale. same for the iconic brooklyn brownstone.

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Oh, I use it as the epigram to my book.

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do you have a source for that? carrier (the a/c company) proudly proclaims that they provided the air conditioning for the world's first air-conditioned city bus in 1946.

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Yeah. By the 1970s, it was easier to see the streetcars with rose-colored glasses, since the private railway industry was collapsing and traffic had become the public's daily bugbear. It was laughable to think of railway executives as puppetmasters in 1970. But that wasn't the case before!

Political cartoon showing Henry Huntington, president of the Pacific Electric Railway, as a colossal puppetmaster standing over Los Angeles.

Put yourselves in the shoes of passengers. Given the choice between a new bus with A/C and an old streetcar without A/C... this is a no-brainer. 9/

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in many cases, the train company was _also_ the bus company! the pacific electric railway in LA also owned the motor transit company, which ran the region's buses. 6/

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