How cars fuel the forever war

With the Iran war spluttering to a close, mavens of American decline will be sharpening their pens. We can already guess what they’ll say. Everyone now understands that the United States runs on cheap oil, and that the Washington establishment will risk sandy quagmires to preserve it. But what’s explored less often is why America perennially treats fluctuations in the crude price as a matter of geopolitical life and death.

To answer that question, try travelling to the AT&T Stadium. Not far from downtown Dallas, it’s hosting nine games at this summer’s World Cup. Yet despite being criss-crossed by highways, the stadium is almost comically hard to reach by public transport. Yes, there are shuttle buses for bewildered European supporters. But the whole trip, including an awkward train transfer, takes some 90 minutes, compared to just 20 by private car. From Kansas City to Miami, other host stadiums are similarly tricky to reach, even as 45% of Americans lack any access to public transport whatsoever.

The point, here, is that the US is utterly dependent on cars and trucks to function. Roughly speaking, the average American consumes 22 barrels of oil per year. The average Brit uses less than half that; the average Italian about a third. For all the talk of infrastructure and energy independence, trains and passenger rail remain the houseplant that Washington forgets to water — decade after decade, now going on nearly a century.

Even in a famously embattled industry, it’s been a uniquely difficult year for American rail. In February, Amtrak cancelled service between New York and Boston due to intense blizzards, giving intra-state passengers no sense of when service would return. That’s echoed by a more general malaise. Even living in the Acela Boston-DC corridor — where train services are far more extensive than anywhere else in the country — passengers will often be maddeningly frustrated. NJ Transit trains into New York are so frequently cancelled for “overhead wire” failures that passengers must now warn their colleagues and employers that, on any given day, thanks to the country’s third-world infrastructure, they might simply not make it into the city.

A great many on the online Right prefer to blame the dysfunction of American rail on Amtrak and the rail industry itself. But, in most cases, that’s unfair. Unlike American secondary education — where high spending coexists with mediocre outcomes — US rail is generally starved of funds. The problem is not a disconnect between spending and performance; it is the simple absence of investment. In total, the federal government spends only about $30-35 per person on rail, whereas Sweden routinely spends roughly 10 times that. Even Germany, lately facing mounting criticism over the decline of its own rail network, spends roughly six times more per capita.

You can’t bake bread without flour. And given the meagre funds they have to work with, Amtrak and other American rail systems punch well above their weight in both functionality and reliability. This raises the question: if rail is considered vital across much of the wealthy industrialised world — including in China, a country every bit as vast — why is it still treated as the ugly runt of America’s transit system?

The boilerplate answer involves the country’s uniquely anti-statist brand of politics, not to mention its hyper-individualist mindset. No doubt that’s partly true. American political culture is characterised by what communitarians call “thin” social ties — with most citizens preferring privacy and autonomy to a dense communal life. It’s clear that a great many Americans would, if given the choice, still prefer to commute inside personal, metal bubbles than sit near their social inferiors on the train. But the deeper reality is that even the option of public transport is rarely available to the vast majority of Americans. Only about 15% of urban Americans boast walking-distance access to metros, commuter rails, or suburban rails, compared to about half in Western Europe and three quarters in South Korea.

All this dysfunction is in fact the long-arc result of a deliberate — and criminal — conspiracy to destroy American passenger rail during the most critical years of the country’s urban development. In other words, the country’s toxic relationship with passenger rail did not begin organically. Nor did it emerge, as most presume, from some spontaneous cultural preference for cars and highways. Living in today’s wasteland of car parks and strip malls, it is difficult to imagine now, but during the Depression only one in 10 Americans owned a car. Of course, they still got around, just mostly on streetcars or other forms of rail.

Throughout the long 19th century, and even during much of the Second World War, streetcar systems were at their high point. Streetcars, like those still remaining in New Orleans and San Francisco, were plentiful, safe, and widely used in nearly every major American metro ar…