Public transportation is a $79 billion industry that employs more than 430,000 people. Approximately 6,800 organizations provide public transportation in the United States. 45% of Americans have no access to public transportation.
Public transit is essential to everyday living in communities across the country, providing access to jobs, schools, shopping, healthcare, and other services while enabling equitable access and sustainable mobility options. Unfortunately, 45% of Americans have no access to transit.
Transportation also leads to noise pollution, water pollution, and affects ecosystems through multiple direct and indirect interactions. With the continuous growth in transportation, increasingly shifting to high-speed transportation modes, these externalities are expected to grow.
While the US was a passenger train pioneer in the 19th century, after WWII, railways began to decline. The auto industry was booming, and Americans bought cars and houses in suburbs without rail connections. Highways (as well as aviation) became the focus of infrastructure spending, at the expense of rail.
The APTA's study – The Hidden Traffic Safety Solution: Public Transportation, concludes that public transit is essentially over 10 times safer than traveling by any other means of individual transport such as a car.
Because America has been owned and operated by the petroleum industry for over a century. Cities were intentionally planned to make automobiles required. In many cases existing tram lines were bought up and demolished by oil companies to ensure that people had to use cars to get to food sources and work.
Hong Kong, ChinaThe Special Administrative Region of China – Hong Kong currently holds the top spot in the Urban Mobility Readiness Index for 2022 for having the world's best public transportation system.
Inadequate public transportation can also increase social isolation, particularly for older populations and people with disabilities or others who do not drive. This can increase the risk for early mortality, depression, and dementia.
Motorcycles had a fatality rate of 212 per billion passenger miles, by far the highest of all modes: “A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying — 29 times the risk for automobiles and light trucks.”
From the subway to buses, streetcars, and ferries, public transit networks in the United States offer a variety of travel options. The most widely used form of public transport in the United States is buses, which account for nearly half of all public transit trips.