Back to the Future of Transit

New York Times

01-05-2025

Note: This newsletter was sent to readers on April 23, 2025.
Dear Headway reader,
These days, transportation in the United States has a back-to-the-future quality.
Over the course of the 20th century, in state after state and city after city, once-robust systems of mass transit gave way to sprawling highway and road systems. As the costs and limitations of this car-centric transportation infrastructure have grown increasingly apparent, bygone visions of transit — long-destroyed streetcar systems and railroads — serve as reminders of what was once possible. They also suggest what might be possible again.
Michael Kimmelman, The Times's chief architecture critic and Headway's editor at large, recently had the chance to see one of these back-to-the-future visions made manifest.
Brightline and what's next
As Michael recounts, Brightline is a particularly evocative example of the ways American transit infrastructure is caught between the past and the future.
Its sleek and well-appointed trains evoke the high-speed passenger rail now prevalent in Europe and Japan, but they aren't quite fast enough to qualify as true high-speed rail. Its private ownership recalls the days of the railroad barons. As Michael reports, Wes Edens, the billionaire co-owner who had the idea for Brightline, was inspired by a book about Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway. But in an era when public development faces numerous hurdles, private investment may be critical to advancing rail transit in the United States.
(For more background on some of those challenges, revisit Ralph Vartabedian's deep dive from 2022 into why California's long-planned high-speed rail project has been so troubled .)
In an explainer accompanying Michael's article about Brightline, Alexander Nazaryan expands on some of the reasons high-speed rail has been so slow to take off in the United States, and some of the places where it is beginning to take shape. The next project up — expected to be the first true high-speed rail operating in America — is one that Michael also touches on in his reporting: Brightline West, a line connecting Las Vegas to greater Los Angeles.
Revisiting: Beyond high-speed rail
Some of the most transformative innovation in moving people around in recent decades has come from pioneering new approaches to bus transportation.
In December 2023, Eden Weingart reported an illustrated walk-through for Headway on rapid bus routes that have taken root in several U.S. cities. In places like Richmond, Va., these bus rapid-transit systems are also back-to-the-future manifestations, contemporary echoes of streetcar systems from the 19th century.
One of the most notable aspects of the rapid bus systems is that they offer a more lightweight and nimble vision of infrastructure than high-speed rail. They allow cities to build on existing road infrastructure to achieve significant lifts in ridership and reductions in commute time.
Eden also found that bus rapid-transit projects can sometimes be cheaper and faster to build than other options. Amy Silbermann, who was Pittsburgh's deputy chief transit planning officer at the time, told Eden, 'B.R.T. has just become an option that gets you probably 90 percent of the benefit, at a tenth of the cost,' compared with an equivalent light rail system.
How is transit transforming your community?
Headway is continuing to explore the possibilities of transit in cities. Our call for examples of projects that are changing communities in notable ways has pointed us to transit projects in every stage of development, from wished for to long completed.
We've seen a number of examples of communities revisiting disruptive road projects, reclaiming car lanes for pedestrians and cyclists and bringing new life to struggling streetscapes.
Where should we look next?
— Matt Thompson
Links we liked
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