Who Tore Up the Tracks? · Episode 20 of 24 · 21 min
The Ratchet: The Verdict
The case against the series is strong: by 1955, before any Interstate was built, about seventy percent of America's postwar transit collapse had already happened. The reply is not that Americans should not have bought cars but that peer countries built highways and kept funded transit. The ratchet funds one mode automatically and the other by annual permission.
Who's who
- Harry F. Byrd+2 more episodesSenator whose fund was built to avoid general revenue
Where it happens
- San Francisco Bay Area, California+3 more episodesBART's budget depends on a November 2026 ballot measure
- Illinois+3 more episodesPassed a transit funding law that averted a fiscal cliff in 2025
Timeline
- 1926Transit ridership reaches its true pre-war peak of 17,254 million trips
- 1946All-time peak of 23,463 million trips, inflated by wartime rationing
- 1955Seventy percent of the 1946-1972 ridership decline already complete
- 1972Ridership trough of 6,567 million trips, down 72 percent
- 2008Highway Trust Fund stops covering its own outlays
- October 2025Illinois passes about $1.2 billion a year for transit
Still debated
The ridership percentages and motorway-per-head ratios are arithmetic on published series, and the 1946 peak was war-inflated. No harmonized international public transport funding dataset exists, so the peer comparison is incomplete by admission.