Leaving The Station: John Rennie Short on Public Transit

Abstract

If you live in the US, chances are you have at some point been frustrated that our public transit systems don’t do a great job linking urban centers with suburbs, can’t get you to the airport or work in a reasonable amount of time (or at all), and cost way too much.

You don’t have to travel to Tokyo, or Zurich, or Paris to see that public transportation in the US is not what it could be, but our guest today on Sea Change Radio has done just that. He is John Rennie Short, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland and he recently published an article in The Conversation detailing the paltry state of public transit in the US, and how we got here. He discusses how the political landscape has affected infrastructure development, and the many costs associated with the decline of our country’s public transportation system, which can be measured in terms of lower GDP, wasted fuel, and lost time, not to mention the terrible environmental toll.