When it comes to the quality of public transit, comparisons between American cities and their international counterparts are usually met with a simple answer: “It’s different there.”
The argument goes that these differences are vast and fundamental: Europe is more densely populated, and its older cities – settled centuries before the automobile – will always be more convenient to transportation. On the other hand, massive urban growth in Asian cities has been accompanied (and accelerated) by huge government investments in urban rail networks. But the United States flourished in the automobile era in the twentieth century, and the private car is still king; Most American cities and their suburbs depend entirely on it.
