Public transportation in the United States
The United States is served by a wide array of public transportation, including various forms of bus, rail, ferry, and sometimes, airline services.
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor is the location of the only operating high speed rail network in the Americas: the Acela Express.
Nearly every major city in the United States offers some form of bus service, which have flexible routes on existing streets and make frequent stops.
Bus rapid transit attempts to mimic the speed of a light rail system by operating on a separate right-of-way.
Several coastal cities offer ferry service linking localities that are across large bodies of water where constructing road and railway bridges is not financially viable.
[11][12] In the 21st century, the U.S. has a low level of public transport compared to other developed Western nations, which has been relatively consistent according to a study covering 1980 through 2010.
[14] As of March 2020, Amtrak provides public railway transportation on 35 lines, with services concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, Northeast, California, and the Midwest.
Passenger volume decreased as a result of expanding road and air travel, and urban decay that caused many neighborhoods with bus depots to become more dangerous.
They became popular with non-Chinese college students and others who wanted inexpensive transportation, and between 1997 and 2007 Greyhound lost 60% of its market share in the Northeastern United States to the Chinatown buses.
During the following decade, new bus lines such as Megabus and BoltBus emulated the Chinatown buses' practices of low prices and curbside stops on a much larger scale, both in the original Northeast Corridor and elsewhere, while introducing yield management techniques to the industry.
[17] New lower fares introduced by Greyhound on traditional medium-distance routes and rising gasoline prices have increased ridership across the network and made bus travel cheaper than all alternatives.
[22] In the United States several moderately sized cities have BRT as an alternative to light rail due to perceived costs and political will.
Notable examples of moderately sized cities with BRT as their fulcrum of public transportation include the Silver Line in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the GRTC Pulse in Richmond, Virginia, and the BusPlus in Albany, New York.
A public transit network generally orders vehicles to its own specifications as to length and passenger capacity, seated and standing.
[23][24] Some urban transit buses are built as articulated, longer vehicles to serve routes with high passenger demand.
A subset of urban transit buses is the higher-fare, longer distance bus for people commuting to work in one or two US metropolitan areas.
At least part of the drop in urban driving can be explained by the 4% increase in the use of public transportation [26] About one in every three users of mass transit in the United States and two-thirds of the nation's rail riders live in New York City and its suburbs.
Whereas most countries usually don’t put motoring taxes to a specific use, there are instances in the United States where this revenue is earmarked to fund public transport.
In contrast to other Western countries, public transport use is low and mostly by the poor, which makes it harder to raise additional funds.
In response to reductions in Federal support for public transport, individual states and cities sometimes levy local taxes to maintain their transit systems.
