City Leaders are Holding Back Improvement

The US is heading in the wrong direction in regards to public transportation. Public transportation systems are created for the purpose of looking good and appeasing congress. These systems do not actually help anyone and become a drain on funding and a stain on the city’s image. Transportation needs to be created to fit the need of people, not to fit the agenda of politicians.

Transportation is an area that the US is lagging far behind the rest of the world in. European and Asian countries have had high speed rail lines and other advanced forms of public transportation for decades. The US still has trouble funding any form of transportation other than roads.

Cities must stop looking for the quick fix. These problems will still be here tomorrow, next year, and in five years. City leaders need to look past what will get them reelected in a few years to what will help the city in twenty. Infrastructure for public transportation needs to be built. It will be years before transportation improve significantly. But long term goals need to be set before anything will happen.

But government programs and politicians looking to quickly improve a city’s image have stopped progress. Programs like the congressional Urban Mass Transportation Administration or UMTA have in the past pushed transportation programs for the sake of having them rather than fixing actual problems. This leads to transportation systems that do not fit the public need and become unused and a drain on funding.

The Detroit People Mover is a perfect example of this. After being pushed by UMTA to create some kind of rail system, Detroit created the People Mover. It offers a whopping three mile loop of transport (Blueprint America). On an average day, it services 7,500 people, which is about 2.5% of its maximum capacity of 288,000 people per day. What it was supposed to do for the city was look good (UMTA). But how can a system look good when it does not function well enough to be used?

This problem is not limited to Detroit. MARTA is another great example of this. It was created because politicians thought that Atlanta needed some form of light rail, despite the studies against light rail. The MARTA rail system was created for show by people who do not use it and now ironically find it a stain on Atlanta (Konrad).

Each city is unique and each city has unique problems. Just because one thing works in a certain city does not mean that it will work it another. Different cities are laid out differently and work differently. Atlanta for example has a very low population density, meaning that the people living in Atlanta are very spread out. This means that any public transportation needs to have many and frequent stops at locations of people who will use them. MARTA unfortunately does not do this.

Instead of creating new useless transportation systems, city leaders need to look at both how existing transportation systems can be improved and what new systems can be implemented over the coming years to actually improve public transportation. The needs of the people must come first, not the needs of the politicians.

Words Cited

Konrad, Miriam. Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility Under Construction. New York: SUNY UP, 2010. 

Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City. Dir. Aaron Woolf. Prod. PBS. 2010. Film. 

"The Downtown People Mover Program." UW Faculty Web Server. University of Washington. Web. 20 Sept. 2011. < http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/dpmhist.htm >.