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The Nation’s mass transit hypocrisy

By

by Stephen Smith

I was heartened to see an article about the need for mass transit in the pages of The Nation, though I was severely disappointed by the magazine’s own hypocrisy and historical blindness. The article is in all ways a standard left-liberal screed against the car and for mass transit, which is a topic close to my heart, though I’d prefer a more libertarian approach to returning America to its mass transit roots as opposed to the publicly-funded version that The Nation advocates.

The first bit of historical blindness comes at the end of the second paragraph, when The Nation argues for government investment in mass transit on the grounds that it will “strengthen labor, providing a larger base of unionized construction and maintenance jobs.” But don’t they realize that the demands of organized labor were one of the straws that broke the privately-owned mass transit camel’s back during the first half of the twentieth century? Joseph Ragen wrote an excellent essay about how unions in San Francisco demanded that mass transit companies employ two workers per streetcar instead of one, codifying their wishes through a series of legislative acts and even a referendum. Saddled with these additional costs, the streetcar companies could not make a profit, and eventually the lines were paved over to make way for the automobile. Mass transit companies, whether publicly- or privately-owned, cannot shoulder the burden of paying above-market wages and still hope to pose any serious threat to the automobile’s dominance.

The second, and perhaps more egregious error, comes a little later, when The Nation lays the blame on every group but itself for the deteriorating state of mass transit in America:

Nonetheless, smart growth and transportation activists still have high hopes that the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will revitalize mass transit. But institutional stumbling blocks–including generations of federal policy favoring roads and cars; pressure from fiscal conservatives; and the power of auto, oil and highway construction lobbies–may cause them to miss this opportunity.

Smart growth, though not a libertarian movement, has a distinctly libertarian issue at its core: reversing the mandatory low density zoning and parking regulations that afflict almost every city, town, and village in America. But who started the movement for zoning and low-density planning in the first place? Progressives, a group which The Nation fancies itself a member of.

And in fact, a search of The Nation’s archives reveals that my suspicions were correct: the magazine was, sure enough, among those who were calling for a de-densification of America, and railing against the inefficiencies of mass transit. From the April 24 issue published in 1920, there’s an article entitled “The Lack of Houses: Remedies” in which the author, Arthur Gleason, lays out his policy prescriptions for dealing with what he considered to be a dearth of housing in America. Regarding zoning (which at the time almost always meant separating homes from jobs and decreasing density – anathema to the New Urbanist call for mixed uses and density), Gleason was wholeheartedly in favor of it:

Zoning regulates and limits the height and bulk of buildings, and regulates and determines the area of courts, yards, and other open spaces. It divides the city into districts. It regulates and restricts the location of trades and industries and the location of buildings. It conserves property values, directs building development, is a security against nuissance, a guarantee of stability, and an attraction to capital.

Not only did The Nation circa 1920 abhor density, but it also treated mass transit with disdain, writing that “[s]ubways make a slum out of a suburb.” This is typical of progressives of the era, who saw mass transit as capitalistic and backwards. There was also a tinge of racism to the attitude, as the “slum” was populated largely by Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, while the “suburb” contained more acceptable non-immigrant Americans.

The Nation pays lip-service to America’s mass transit-laden past, writing that “it predates the automobile,” but then conveniently forgets the reasons that mass transit in America ceased to exist. And that’s convenient, because the reasons – almost all driven by government intervention against streetcars, subways, and density – were once causes that The Nation championed.

This post was written by Stephen Smith, who writes for his own blog called Rationalitate.

Comments

  1. No offense–I basically agree with you about the issues discussed here–but I think it’s unduly harsh to deem an article from 80 years ago that contradicts one today as hypocrisy. On a time scale that long, I think it’s just called learning. (Although as you point out, they seem to have learned what, but not why or how.)

  2. No offense–I basically agree with you about the issues discussed here–but I think it’s unduly harsh to deem an article from 80 years ago that contradicts one today as hypocrisy. On a time scale that long, I think it’s just called learning. (Although as you point out, they seem to have learned what, but not why or how.)

  3. I’ve seen old photos of 4 street cars from competing lines going up and down Market Street. I’ve often wondered why the street car companies in SF went out of business and let the city form a gov’t monopoly. Now I know why. Thanks.

  4. I’ve seen old photos of 4 street cars from competing lines going up and down Market Street. I’ve often wondered why the street car companies in SF went out of business and let the city form a gov’t monopoly. Now I know why. Thanks.

  5. Planning, zoning, sprawl, and roads were all part of the prevailing progressive agenda back in those days. That is just one example of many from that time. (Monday, I should be posting an article I’m fine-tuning about Hoover’s contributions to the progressive legacy in this matter)

    I think it goes to show the deep flaws in the progressive philosophy that dreams big things, then rallies against the results of the implementation of their policies when the unintended consequences cause problems they despise. They then conveniently forget that their own ideology shares the blame.

  6. Planning, zoning, sprawl, and roads were all part of the prevailing progressive agenda back in those days. That is just one example of many from that time. (Monday, I should be posting an article I’m fine-tuning about Hoover’s contributions to the progressive legacy in this matter)

    I think it goes to show the deep flaws in the progressive philosophy that dreams big things, then rallies against the results of the implementation of their policies when the unintended consequences cause problems they despise. They then conveniently forget that their own ideology shares the blame.

  7. I might not have been so harsh if they had shown any realization that it was the Progressives’ policies that got us into this mess in the first place, but they punted the blame to everyone but themselves. “Federal policy favoring roads and cars”?? Yeah right – local policies pushed by early 20th century progressives were much worse. And though I didn’t mention it, the article’s author is brazen enough to excuse the local planning boards for their restrictive anti-density regulations, saying:

    Under current rules, funding for a mass-transit system is only provided to areas that already have the density to support it. But mass transit works best when it is built in advance of creeping development, as it was in New York City, so that the tallest buildings can be built closest to the transit nodes, where the premium for housing or office and retail space is highest.

    To be honest, it’s not entirely clear that the author understands at all why New York City could never be built today.

  8. I might not have been so harsh if they had shown any realization that it was the Progressives’ policies that got us into this mess in the first place, but they punted the blame to everyone but themselves. “Federal policy favoring roads and cars”?? Yeah right – local policies pushed by early 20th century progressives were much worse. And though I didn’t mention it, the article’s author is brazen enough to excuse the local planning boards for their restrictive anti-density regulations, saying:

    Under current rules, funding for a mass-transit system is only provided to areas that already have the density to support it. But mass transit works best when it is built in advance of creeping development, as it was in New York City, so that the tallest buildings can be built closest to the transit nodes, where the premium for housing or office and retail space is highest.

    To be honest, it’s not entirely clear that the author understands at all why New York City could never be built today.

  9. The San Francisco story is actually quite interesting. The best analysis that I’ve seen of it, oddly enough, was in a completely unsourced Wikipedia article. Someone has since taken it all out due to the lack of citations, but you can still see an old version of the article here.

  10. The San Francisco story is actually quite interesting. The best analysis that I’ve seen of it, oddly enough, was in a completely unsourced Wikipedia article. Someone has since taken it all out due to the lack of citations, but you can still see an old version of the article here.

  11. First, even if SF trolleys had kept a sole agent on board, many still would have probably gone under, as they did everywhere else. Regulations overly benefiting workers are not enough to destroy transit in itself. Secondly, implying that libertarians are in favor of smart growth and transit, which necessarily implies strong involvement from the government, while progressives favor sprawl, is obviously absurd – isolated examples from the 20’s notwithstanding. From the perspective of the 20’s, zoning was a major improvement over a total lack of regulation. There is nothing wrong with zoning in itself, with an effort to shape and control development. Transit-friendly urbanist zoning is the solution, and while it can harness the free market under the right conditions, the heavy hand of government is necessary to put it in place and to pay for its infrastructure. Outside of Japan, public transit will always rely on governement subsidies to some extent, and if the Nation took 90 years to come around, well better late than never.

Trackbacks

  1. […] owners of streetcar networks were some of the wealthiest people around. The Nation was, by 1920, editorializing against density and subways (they “make a slum out of a suburb”), and the progressive New Dealer mayor of New York […]

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