Why don't more U.S. cities have metro systems like New York?

The subway was my favorite part of living New York. The New York subway has more stations than any other metro system in the world (472), meaning I could just pop up just about anywhere in the city and live there entirely without a car. It was great. When I moved away, I couldn’t help but wonder — why do so few U.S. cities have subways?

Resources on this topic:

How Much Does Rail Transit Cost to Build and Operate:

Urban Densities and Transit: A Multi-dimensional Perspective:

Loo, B. P. Y., & Cheng, A. H. T. (2010). Are there useful yardsticks of population size and income level for building metro systems? Some worldwide evidence. Cities, 27(5), 299–306.

Video sources:

Photo sources:
- Flickr user A Diamond Fell From the Sky
- Flickr user Atomic Taco
- Flickr user Canadian Pacific
- Flickr user Ian Fuller
- Flickr user Michael B
- Flickr user Michael Semensohn
- Flickr user Paul Sullivan
- Flickr user Susanne
- New York MTA
- Oregon Department of Transportation
- Trimet
- Virginia Department of Transportation

Filmed in sunny Sacramento, California.

[verdiborsen]

Oslo has a metro system and there are barely 5 million people in all of Norway. I think you underestimate the cultural impact.

[Gobi_Ness]

Man, I really love metros. And I do not know why.

[lobaxx]

The limit of 5 million inhabitants is insane.

Stockholm has less then 1 million inhabitants (and only 1.5 million in the urban metropolitan area), yet operates a metro line with 100 stations over 7 lines, with new stations and a new line under construction. Not to mention cities like Oslo, Vienna, Milan and Munich that operate subway systems of a similar size (around 100 stations) on population significantly smaller than 5 million.


Clearly, what matters is population density, not total population.

[fheedpexx]

Americans = having a car is freedom.
Europeans = not having to have a car is freedom.

That's the problem right there.

[EkainMunduate]

Well, Bilbao (Europe) has 350.000 inhabitants and a metropolitan area of less than a Million; and it has 3 metro lines and moves 92million rides per year! I think America loves cars too much to put a 5million limit

[whereaboutsunknown]

After living in Japan experiencing public trains and railways, I cannot stop thinking about why the U.S. doesn't have them. IT'S SO MUCH MORE CONVIENIENT.
Here's the thing, buildings, shops, and houses are built a lot closer together because there's no wasted space on gigantic parking lots. It's all close enough to walk to. And you would build everything around a train station or transportation hub.

I hate cars. I hate all these roads we're building and wasting space on. It's expensive to own and maintain a car. We could build so much more residential areas and parks. Then housing prices wouldn’t be so ridiculously expensive as they are now. >:(

[PeterShipley]

also New York is one of the few transit systems that is truly 24 hours

[RappinPicard]

The reason why so many cities built metro systems in the 1960's and 70's is that under the Johnson Administration, Congress passed the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 (UMTA), which provided an 80/20 split for mass transit systems, meaning that cities and municipalities could build mass transit systems and only pay 20% of what they actually cost to build.

Under Nixon in 1970 this was pared back to a 50/50 split, and under Reagan it was cut even further by switching it from a percentage of funds matching to a block grant system.

[TheCatzFranzNeko]

Stockholm:
City with 1 million people, not very dense at all
We got a metro with 7 lines, tram, a hecc of a lot of busses, commuter trains, and more.

I think it relies way more on cultural significance.

[AgntfChas]

Having lived in Moscow and Athens, trust me when I tell you that you want a metro.

[SandBoxJohn]

Washington DC got its metro system when local activists opposed the building freeways into and around its urban core. The funds appropriated for those freeways were transferred to build the metro.

[tarcal]

3:32 Interesting, in Europe, so many cities are less than 5m but have excellent subway systems. Though, most cities here are dense. My hometown—Budapest, Hungary—is just shy of 2 million, but the subway is so essential. Even with it, there is a high-enough traffic congestion, and without it the city would grind to a halt with full gridlock on the surface.

[BrainMusicCenter]

One major problem the US has had with any form of rail transport is that auto and oil companies in the 1940"s and 50's actually bought up a large number of rail lines and dismantled them. This is a large part of the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and it's surprisingly true. Also, when suburbs were just beginning to be a thing the auto and oil companies lobbied hard for highways over train lines, and they were very successful, with most rural train lines in the US now being used only for freight.

[gemmahudack]

As a San Francisco native, I loved my high school commute. I walked for about ten minutes to my nearest BART station and took it for about twenty minutes, got off, and walked to my school and sometimes I even had the time to grab a coffee. The rates were great too for a student card, only two bucks to go from the East Bay into downtown San Francisco. Good times...

[ericschumacher]

The US was hit by the oil embargo in the 1970s. That is likely why city officials bagan investing in alternative methods of transportation.

[xander]

America: 5 million people is a good number to start considering a metro

Glasgow, pop 600, 000: cowabunga it is (glasgow subway is also on of the oldest in the world)

[johanbiswas]

I live in a City in Germany with only 400.000 people, and It has a Metro, light rail and Bus.

[Schnaitheimer]

In soviet union, there's been the rule, that a city get a metro system when it reaches 1 mio. inhabitants. As they usually built new suburban areas with apartment blocks, the high density for such systems was given from the beginning. The soviet metro systems can operate a train down to every 90 seconds with 8 wagon train sets like in Moscow.
It's typical for the soviet systems to have at least (planned) three lines that match in triangle around the city center. But in some cities, till nowadays, only one line was built or even that failed like in Omks (western siberia). While Moscow's system is growing by several stations each year, other cities' metro systems grow much slower, but at Moscow, it's said to be real estate interest driven.
An interesting system is the one at Volgograd: as the city still has about 600, 000 inhabitants, they officially weren't allowed to built a real metro, so they built a streetcar tunnel in the city center that is operated "metro like" and continues as normal tramways in the suburbs. The two lines using the tunnel are called "fast tramways". They use tunnel overflies at the end of the tunnels to serve central platforms within the tunnel and outside platforms on the rest of the network.

[felixw]

Why just Cities with over 5 Million inhabitants? Cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Brussels, Helsinki, Marseille, Athens, Rome, Vienna or Lisbon are much smaller than 5 Mio people and still have good working metro systems...

[ertio]

Well, here in Italy, there are no cities with more than 5.000.000 inhabitants, but 7 cities have metro systems, with 3 having more than one line.
Heck, the smallest city to have a metro line, Brescia, has 200.000 inhabitants!