We Can Have Good Transit in the US — If Travelers Decide to Use It

A paradigm shift is necessary to improve travel in the United States.

I’m writing this onboard the Bustang, Colorado’s intercity bus service that connects cities and towns across the state. The bus has decent Wi-Fi, ample legroom, and even a restroom at the back. I’m traveling from Grand Junction to Vail, a trip that will take about three hours and cost $26. If I were to drive to Vail, I’d spend about $15 in charge on my Chevy Bolt (not trying to out-smug anyone here, just stating facts) and $60 to park my car overnight in the town’s garage.

Last month I rode the Brightline train in Florida, the new almost-Euro-high-speed rail service that connects Orlando to the south Florida metroplex. From the moment I arrived at the station, the experience was incredible. Security and check in were clean and fast, and there was even a good bar in the waiting area. Once onboard, the train had comfortable seats with food and drinks available for delivery to my seat. I felt as though I were in Europe, even as we sped south through the palm-lined swampland surrounding the Orlando airport.

These two experiences are, to me, proof that the US can have good transit. Increasingly, we do — you just have to be in the right place. To make this ubiquitous across the country is not a pipe dream. We just have to get over our mental blockade of what transit is and who it’s for. Travelers have a massive role to play in this.

Photo: Jillian Cain Photography/Shutterstock

The crux of the problem

A lot of Americans have internalized the idea that transit is what you use when you can’t afford a car. It’s a legacy of the postwar decades, when the car became a status symbol, and the bus became its opposite.

Europe broke this cycle by never fully entering it. Japan broke it by building transit so fast and so well that driving in major cities became the inconvenient option. South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan — the same story. None of these places have some innate cultural predisposition toward public transportation. They built systems good enough that people with choices chose to use them.

Brightline is an early attempt at that strategy. It’s a private company betting that if you build a comfortable, reliable, premium product, people will pay for it. Their ridership numbers are climbing. The demographic isn’t the captive transit rider, but rather it’s the leisure traveler or commuter who would otherwise drive or fly.

When those travelers experience the simplicity of the experience on top of the convenience of being dropped in a city center, it’s easy to see the benefits of this type of travel.

I’ve written before about Union Station in Denver. It’s become a kind of proof-of-concept for what transit infrastructure can do to a neighborhood — or, more accurately, what happens when a city decides a transit hub deserves to be beautiful.

Denver’s Union Station sat nearly dormant for decades before a $500 million redevelopment turned it into one of the most vibrant gathering spaces in the city. It’s now a hotel, a food and drink destination, a farmers’ market venue, and still a working transit hub connecting Amtrak trains, light rail, commuter rail to the airport, and regional bus lines. On a Saturday afternoon, the main hall is packed with people who aren’t necessarily going anywhere. They’re just there. That’s what great civic infrastructure does: it creates places worth being in.

Kansas City’s Union Station tells a version of the same story. Restored in the 1990s after years of vacancy and further revitalized since, it now anchors the Crossroads Arts District, one of the most economically dynamic and culturally interesting neighborhoods in the city. The station itself houses a science museum, restaurants, and event space.

Imagine what those neighborhoods look like if you flip the logic: if planners in the mid-20th century had demolished those stations and run a freeway through instead. It happened in plenty of other cities. The ones that kept their stations are now pointing to them as anchors of revitalization. The ones that didn’t are still paying the price in surface parking lots and highway-severed downtowns.

Rail stations attract density, and density is what makes cities work. Shops, restaurants, hotels, offices, and housing all cluster around transit hubs because the access they provide is valuable.

An inside look at a Brightline train. Photos: Tim Wenger

Travelers can help reshape the narrative

The political and economic hold-ups to achieving this across the country are psychological. Americans don’t take trains and buses partly because they don’t know how. The unfamiliarity breeds anxiety, and anxiety leads people back to the known quantity of the car. There’s then not that mass of people advocating for trains.

This is where people who travel enough to have options and opinions have a role to play that goes beyond their own carbon footprint. Every time someone with a platform chooses the train and talks about it, they’re doing a small act of normalization. Every Substack post, every Instagram story shot through a train window, every conversation that starts with “actually, the Bustang was great” takes a brick from the wall between Americans and a better way to move around our country.

I believe that the paradigm shift is underway. Brightline is private and premium. The Bustang is publicly operated and affordable. Amtrak’s Acela corridor is a federally subsidized quasi-high-speed service. Texas Central, if it ever gets built, will be privately financed Japanese bullet train technology.

Yes, American distances are greater than European ones. Yes, our cities are less dense. But I don’t think most Americans are opposed to good transit. I think most Americans have simply never experienced it on their home turf, and so the idea of it lives in the abstract as a thing Europeans do, a thing that requires a certain kind of city, a thing that isn’t quite for them.

We have a long way to go, and it’s going to take a societal paradigm shift to get there. Will we make that shift, or will we remain victims of our own design?

As travelers, let’s do the right thing.

-Tim Wenger, editor

---

Get the next story in your inbox.