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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Description: Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (U Chicago Press, 2023), our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way.Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major fa...