Back in 1970, 77 million Americans commuted to work every day, and 9% of them took a bus or a train. By 2019, the number of U.S. workers had nearly doubled, to more than 150 million. But the vast majority of these new workers chose to drive: The number of public transit riders increased by only around 1 million during those years, and their share of the country’s overall commuters collapsed to 5%. 

That historic shift reflects several broad trends in U.S. life, including suburbanization patterns and urban highway expansion, the growth of the car-friendly Sunbelt, and the depopulation of once-robust industrial cities. But fundamentally, the fading usefulness of public transit is a result of the fundamental  lack of integration between federal transportation and land-use authorities, says Yonah Freemark, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute.

“In a number of other countries, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are combined in one entity,” he says. “In the United States, we ended up with two different entities.” As a result, housing and mobility needs have been poorly aligned; the landscape is laden with housing that lacks access to public transportation, light rail lines that course through sparsely settled areas, and too many cities whose transit networks can’t connect riders with jobs.  

But as Freemark’s new analysis of commuting data shows, based on his database of long-term trends in U.S. metros, regional patterns reveal a more complex story. Some cities have bucked national trends and gained transit commuters over the last 50 years. Coastal cities like New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston saw an increase of hundreds of thousands of transit commuters between 1970 and 2019. Pre-pandemic, 3 million New Yorkers commuted by bus, subway and train daily — 500,000 more than in 1970 — and the region’s share of transit commuters held relatively steady. 

The flip side of the pattern can be seen in Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, which lead the list of cities — many in the Rust Belt or the South — that have shed tens of thousands of transit commuters.

This unequal pattern of transit commuting is even more acute when the share of commuters is taken into account. In New Orleans, for example, nearly a quarter of residents got to work via bus and streetcar in 1970. By 2019, only about 5% did. Similar drops are seen in smaller industrial cities like Buffalo, Richmond, Cleveland and Milwaukee. “In the 1970s, use of public transportation was really common in cities all across the country no matter their size,” says Freemark. Now, widespread transit commuting is a phenomenon limited largely to large coastal metropolitan areas. “Other regions don’t have realizable public transportation people can depend on.”

Cities where transit use has seen massive reductions tend to be those that have endured deindustrialization and suburbanization during the last 50 years, with a concurrent rise in investments in highways designed to shuttle car-driving commuters in and out of town. “These used to be places that had really successful downtowns, but now most of their workforce has suburbanized,” says Freemark.

The profoundly unequal geography of U.S. transit reflects — and contributes to — the economic gaps that have grown between cities; as struggling metros have shed jobs and wealth, their ability to maintain useful transit systems has likewise declined. “Most money that goes for transportation comes from state and local governments, and their ability to invest is based on their resources,” says Freemark. Poorer regions don’t have enough income to invest in transit, which in turn hampers economic growth even more. “It’s a negative spiral, a vicious cycle; there’s a trap situation going on.”

There are lessons to be learned from the handful of cities — all in the western U.S. — that have managed to grow their share of transit commuters since 1970, Freemark’s analysis concludes. In Seattle and San Francisco, for example, the city has made efforts to centralize jobs in downtown areas, and they boast extensive rail networks that can reach a larger share of commuters in the region. Seattle has also invested heavily in upgrading its bus service, while San Francisco reduced fares for people with low incomes. In Salt Lake City, housing growth in neighborhoods around transit has been prioritized; Portland’s urban growth boundary has been effective in limiting car-centric sprawl. 

Not every region has the means to make the kind of transit investments that would be needed to bring riders back to their 1970 levels, and there’s no question that reversing the effects of a half-century of transit-unfriendly land-use decisions is a tall order. But it’s also increasingly urgent, given the role of car-centric planning in boosting greenhouse gas emissions. “The federal government could play an important job filling the gap” between wealthy and struggling cities, says Freemark. “But they haven’t done that yet.”