Jake Berman: Lost Subways of North America

“In the popular mind, Los Angeles is defined by the freeway, the automobile, and endless suburban sprawl,” Jake Berman wrote in a piece examining Los Angeles’ lost transit. “Four million people live in the city proper, and nineteen million live in the megalopolis. Four in five Angelenos drive to work, while only one in twenty takes mass transit.”

Despite this reputation, Berman asserts the city wasn’t designed for the car. “Quite the opposite.”

Los Angeles, like many North American cities, at one point in its history boasted a comparatively comprehensive rail network. Across the country, streetcars and interurbans, electric railways that connected satellite cities and towns, offered hundreds of thousands mobility. In response to growing populations, many cities even began building subways.

However, the arrival of the freeway—coupled with the spread of zoning regimes, parking mandates, and a commitment to the suburban experiment—put a halt to much of those plans. In some cases, it even reversed course. 

As a result, Berman notes: “They don’t build neighborhoods like they used to.” 

In his latest book, Lost Subways of North America, Berman surveys the rail networks of Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and many others in the hopes of piecing together why our cities’ transit systems are the way that they are. It isn’t blanket nostalgia for a time in American history when rail was king. Some of our legacy systems were, in fact, the product of speculation, mob influence, and competition. Instead, the book functions as more of a catalog of missed opportunities in North American transit, where we stopped short, and where there’s still hope. 

With its collection of beautiful custom maps designed by Berman himself, the book also doubles as a travel guide for the country’s phantom pasts and alternate futures.

Strong Towns was able to catch up with Jake Berman in advance of his book’s official release. The following interview is condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Asia Mieleszko: The crown jewel of this book is in the custom maps you designed. You have several for each city you talk about. You’ve been making maps for a while—in fact, I remember a Vice article detailing how New York City’s MTA had a bone to pick with one of your custom subway maps. I’ll let you decide whether you want to share that particular story, but I’m curious how you got into map-making in the first place and why are maps your tool of choice for storytelling?

Various examples of Berman’s maps.

Jake Berman: So, I got started in mapmaking because of a blind date. I went on a blind date, or at least I was supposed to go on a blind date with somebody in Brooklyn. And that would require me to take the B train from Manhattan and go over the bridge to Brooklyn. That did not happen because the B train didn't run on the weekends and I wasn't able to decipher the map as a brand new transplant to New York from San Francisco.

I got frustrated enough and made my own map. Next year, I moved to Los Angeles and, same thing: I got stuck in traffic on the 101 Freeway one too many times. For the people of Los Angeles who are listening to this, it was on Vermont Avenue in East Hollywood. So at that specific exit I was stuck for half an hour behind one of those people with the jeep and far too many bumper stickers.

And I came to the question: why doesn't Los Angeles have better mass transit? 

“And I came to the question: why doesn’t Los Angeles have better mass transit? ”

And of course, I went to the public library, found a map of the old Pacific Electric Railway (which was four times the size of the modern London Underground) and it kind of hit me. There is a story to be told with these old maps, but modernized and brought into the 21st century, using today's design language.

Plenty of people are aware that most cities in North America used to have incredibly extensive electric railway systems. And it was just normal to take the train places, even in cities which are now all suburban sprawl, like Miami, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Even cities that are famous for being “car cities” used to have very extensive mass transit networks. But it’s hard to convey the scale of just how large and extensive those networks used to be if you just put them into a list.

Berman’s map of the Los Angeles Pacific Electric Railway system in 1926.

Mieleszko: Throughout the book, you highlight several policies that seem totally independent from transit, yet really impact how these systems operate, and how people can use them. To bring up an example in the chapter on Dallas, you illustrate how policies that govern land use conspired to make the transit system, not as good as it could be.

Berman: Absolutely. The single biggest factor is just land use laws.

Somebody would laugh at me if I said that the Los Angeles Metro is the size of the Barcelona Metro. But it's true. Each system is about 100 miles of rail. The difference is that Los Angeles doesn't have a whole lot next to its train stations. 

I write about [land use] in the book when I talk about Dallas, but I'm not specifically calling out Dallas as a uniquely bad example. The problem is more that this is the norm nowadays; if you go to the Dallas suburbs, it will look a lot like the suburbs of Philadelphia, or Chicago, or Miami. 

One of the things that really struck me is that it's not really a technological question why the stations aren't surrounded by…stuff. It's a legal question. It's a political question. It's a regulatory question of what's allowed near the stations, because in the old days, it was just normal to allow, say, three-story row houses with a shop on the first floor. 

Land use policy is transportation policy. And if you don't allow people to do things the old-fashioned way, well, fine. If all you allow are strip malls, then that's what you're going to get.

“Land use policy is transportation policy. And if you don’t allow people to do things the old-fashioned way, well, fine. If all you allow are strip malls, then that’s what you’re going to get.”

Mieleszko: Who do you hope would read this book? And what sort of takeaways would you love for them to come away with?

Berman: So, the obvious answer is I want everybody to read the book. [laughs] This is a book for everybody. 

But seriously, this is the book for the kind of person who wants to know why it is that if you go to London or Paris or Madrid or Tokyo, you can get from point A to point B on foot, by train, by bus, by bicycle, and you are not forced to use a car the way you are in the United States or Canada. It’s an attempt to answer the question, “Why on earth am I stuck in traffic now?” The original inspiration for the book was being stuck on the 101 freeway, you know?

I grew up in a neighborhood, which is exceptional in that I had a grocery around the corner, I had my elementary school down the hill, my dad biked to work, and my mom worked around the corner. And it was a place where my parents definitely had cars. But [having a car] wasn't a necessity for day to day living. 

And when I studied in Europe, it was the same sort of environment where there was a grocery store that was within walking distance on the corner, there was like a bar and a restaurant, and various shopping districts. You didn’t have to own a car in the way you would in [most of] the United States.

Some of that is the fact that there isn't enough physical transit infrastructure. But it's also that there aren't enough things built near the transit infrastructure like they did in the old days. A place like Philadelphia, or San Francisco, or New York, was originally built with the idea that, yeah, you might own a car…but more than likely, the things you need will be within walking distance or within relatively straightforward transit distance. 

Mieleszko: You inspired another question. You mentioned New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco [much of which were built before the car] but then there are these cities, like Dallas, a lot of which developed with the automobile in mind. But I'm wondering if you would say that they were built with the type of car dependency in mind we now associate with Dallas?

Berman: I think that the original sin of most postwar cities was not in building places for the car necessarily. Rather, it was bulldozing large sections of the old city to reorient them around the car. So if you go to a place like say, Baltimore, where the Jones Falls Expressway runs right through downtown, or like Los Angeles, they carved up downtown with, I think, five or six different freeways. That really was the original sin of car dependence.

They have cars in Europe. They have cars in Asia—where do you think Toyota and BMW came from? But the difference is in Madrid, where I used to live, they built the freeway around the city center. It doesn't go into the center of Madrid the way that, say, the 101 freeway or the 10 freeway or the 110 freeway actually go through downtown Los Angeles. And those kinds of things were meant to make it possible for people to drive downtown and commute downtown by car, which we know now was not the brightest idea.

Mieleszko: You told me how with Philadelphia, you ended up not talking about the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway, and instead you talked about SEPTA's operations. How did you choose which story you would tell for each city? 

Berman: I wanted to tell stories that captured something about a city's essence. 

So in writing about Philadelphia, this kind of municipal character of Philly being a self described blue collar city, a gritty city if you will, stood out. (Only Philly would decide to have a hockey mascot that's an orange Muppet named Gritty) 

Philly is a pushy city. It's the kind of place that embodies the “you talkin’ to me?” vibe more than even New York and that gets captured a lot in how the transit system works. Even though SEPTA has a union just like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco and all the rest, in Philly the labor union just assumed that major labor action will be necessary to get pretty basic stuff done that in other cities are simply settled in negotiation. 

I wanted to tell stories about particular cities and the ways they work or don’t work. When it comes to LA, I talked about its complicated relationship with being a major city. It’s a major city that wasn’t designed to be a major city. When dealing with New Orleans, its unusual cultural background affects its transit. With Miami transit, it almost had to be a real estate scam from day one. For some reason, everything in Miami is somehow going to involve a slightly sketchy real estate developer, whether it’s 1923 or 2023. 

Lost Subways of North America drops November 3, 2023. You can order your copy here.

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