New York’s Subway and Washington, DC’s Metro are two of the United States’ busiest rapid-transit systems. But people in the two cities use transit differently.
In New York, multimodal transportation is integral to every aspect of city living – both culturally and practically. In DC, the Metro lines – built over 60 years after New York’s system – are primarily used for commuting to work.
I recently wrote about one clear aspect of this contrast: the differing angles from which the New York Times and Washington Post cover transit. But news coverage is just one of many cultural and political factors that underlie New York and DC’s contrasting mobility cultures – cultures that stem largely from how their transportation systems developed.
The New York region grew up around its urban subway and suburban commuter rail systems, making the city dependent on them by design. Meanwhile, DC-area jurisdictions constructed the Metro largely to serve auto-oriented residents traveling into the city, with the rail system substituting for proposed urban interstates that never got built.
Metro must simultaneously serve car-oriented suburbs and walkable city neighborhoods
Like many American cities, DC’s extensive streetcar system was chopped up in the mid-twentieth century. In their wake, highways paved the way to increasingly sprawling suburbs, and it seemed only a matter of time before the highways carved up the urban core of the nation’s capital as well.
However, unlike similar cities that lacked rapid transit systems at the time, DC fought back. Residents successfully stopped construction of the Three Sisters Bridge, which would have opened the highway expansion floodgates, and funding was diverted to transit expansion. As a result, Metro – initially an afterthought to the proposed freeways – became a focal point of the region’s vision for transportation.
Since Metro was built to fulfill the same needs as the canceled urban interstates, it still had to cater to the region’s auto-oriented suburban population. As a result, many Metro stations are surrounded not by dense, vibrant, mixed-use communities, but instead by asphalt on which drivers can store their cars when they ride the train into town. The low-density suburbs those isolated park-and-ride stations serve were planned primarily around the automobile, so multimodal first- and last-mile solutions at outlying stations are limited.
Only 5 percent of households in the DC region are car-free. Meanwhile, 20 percent of New York-area households do not own cars.
This might explain why only around 5 percent of DC-area households get by without cars, overshadowing the relatively high proportion of car-free households in Washington itself. For comparison, over 20 percent of New York-area households – including nearly half in New York City – are car-free. Car-owning residents are likely to attribute their ability to participate in many enjoyable activities – such as family gatherings, little league games, and dinner outings – to perceived freedom that their automobiles allow them.
A Metro train along a suburban highway. Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab.
WMATA’s cuts to night and weekend rail service in recent years, which took effect as car-based alternatives such as ride-hailing expanded, have helped bring these problems into DC’s urban core. City-dwelling millennials, despite comprising a plurality of Metro’s riders and shunning car ownership, are using the system somewhat less at all times. But when it comes to millennials’ weekend ridership, which has dropped more than 40 percent since 2016, the bottom has utterly fallen out.
Greater Greater Washington President David Alpert, for example, who lives in DC’s centrally located Dupont Circle neighborhood, pointed out that he is particularly likely to use ride-hailing for night and weekend activities, when he finds transit currently “just isn’t very dependable.”
Thus, while the trials and tribulations of driving are reduced to little more than funny stories to tell friends and family, the hassles of Metro’s aging infrastructure compound into apocalyptic cataclysms.
When stakeholders in multimodal transportation have to spend valuable time justifying Metro’s very existence, the improvements that would both resolve Metro’s infrastructural issues and make transit more useful for non-work activities become virtually impossible.
New York grew up around transit, and the resulting connections remain essential to daily life
While the few remnants of the abandoned streetcar system that shaped much of DC rot away, the century-old subway system that shaped New York carries nearly 6 million riders each day. Commuter rail lines fan out from subway hubs into the suburbs. Even overseas rail systems struggle to match the incredible rate at which the subway – which includes lines constructed by both public and private entities – expanded in the early part of the 20th century. New York’s level of 24-hour service still remains unmatched anywhere else in the world.
But New York’s subway did not escape the mid-20th century transportation dark ages unscathed. As rail infrastructure was allowed to decay, reliability and ridership declined steeply. Important lines were abandoned, including the Second Avenue elevated line that has cost billions to just partially replace. And system expansion slowed to a snail’s pace, never to recover.
However, the essence of the city’s transportation culture held strong. Even when the subway hit rock bottom, with its delayed trains covered in graffiti, millions of riders depended on transit – the nerve supporting all aspects of New York life – every day.
Today, the New York subway system – with all its ups and downs – continues to symbolize topsy-turvy life in the fast-paced city. Even as aging infrastructure continues to cause problems and the powers that be have struggled to come up with badly needed funding for transit, there’s never been a question as to whether the general population is committed to the subway’s success – in contrast to DC.
This has helped motivate riders to organize, giving rise to advocacy groups like the NYPIRG Straphangers. These advocacy organizations may not always praise the subway. But instead of just blindly spreading negativity, they try to amplify riders’ voices and legitimately want the system to improve.
Stewart Mader, a New Jersey resident who serves as chair of the PATH Riders’ Council, explained that, though these organizations run the risk of inadvertently repelling would-be riders if they treat transit agencies as their adversaries, they have great potential to build a strong constituency for multimodal transportation.
“Advocacy organizations are most effective when they help the average customer understand how political decisions can support, or undermine, the quality of their everyday transit experience,” Mader said. “This education helps people recognize – and vote for – candidates for elected office who are making transit a priority.”