Transit Systems

History

While the history and origins of all modes of public transport are not completely known, water taxis, a boat for water crossing available for a fee, are the first known forms of public transportation. Ancient Greeks were said to bury their dead with a coin under their tongues for fare on ferries to take them to Hades.

North American public transport also revolved around water-based forms until the early 1800s. Horse-drawn carriages were introduced in New York City in 1827 and expanded to include a horse-drawn railway in 1832.

Cable cars, as popularized today in San Francisco, California, were the first mechanized public transport vehicles in 1873. While a number of cities—including Chicago, Illinois, and New York, New York,—utilized cable cars, only San Francisco's system remains. Cable cars were soon followed by electrically powered streetcars, first used in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888.

Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City opened subterranean subway systems in 1897 and 1904, respectively, but streetcars operating in public rights of way and sharing their route with other forms of transportation, became ubiquitous in North American cities in the first decades of the 1900s, eventually used in 370 U.S. cities by 1912.

Except for those in Seattle, Washington; Detroit, Michigan; San Francisco; New York; and Boston, practically all transit companies were privately owned, and most were forced into bankruptcy in the 1950s and 1960s as suburbanization became the primary form of development, the population in cities plummeted, and Americans' love affair with the private automobile grew exponentially.

Transit, unable to compete with major public investments in roads and highways, fell from its high of 23.4 billion passengers in 1946 to just 10 billion a decade later. Cities all over the United States scaled back or canceled public transit expansions. By 1970, only seven streetcar systems remained in cities, including San Francisco, New Orleans (Louisiana), Newark (New Jersey), Boston, Cleveland (Ohio), and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), and public transit ridership had further fallen to 7.3 billion.

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