I live in France. I would like to add some comments on the article and video, in no particular order.
1: decline of public transport after WW2. This was also the case in Europe, except the east block (it declined after the fall of the USSR) and Switzerland (where public transport apparently still allows to go anywhere today). In rural France, little train lines used to deserve the countryside and were replaced by busses in the 50s-60s. Then the busses went less frequent, and mostly disappeared. I know about the train lines: one used to drive in my backyard and my grand-parents talked about it when I was young.
In the massif central (the mountains in the centre of France), one can still see train bridges and tunnels which were constructed in the 19th century. Lots of them, slowly going derelict.
Basically, the trains lines were cut for the same reasons as they were cut in the USA: less and less people used them and infrastructure costs were high. One important reason behind less usage was also that less and less people lived in the countryside, I did not see that in the video.
2: zoning laws. Zoning laws are probably not as different between Europe and the USA as the video would make you believe. The video compares the old, historical centre of European cities with the US suburbs but in European suburbs zoning laws are closer to what would find in the USA… and public transport is just as bad.
3: one drive against public transport that I did not see in the video was opposition to communism. Remember: we are talking about the time after WW2 and that was the cold war. Train driver unions were very much linked to the communist party, for historical reasons (communist revolutionaries were very much into trains, one of the reasons why Hitler built the first Autobahns) and recognised that mobilising between 500 and 1000 trains drivers was all it took to bring a government to its knees. France’s communist party very much used that power in the 60s-70s.
4: another difference which is absent from the video is that the USA was the largest oil producer after WW2. Europe did not have the luxury of cheap oil, especially after 1973 (foundation year of OPEC) and passed laws that made large cars and fuel more expensive.
5: street trains (tramways). Tramways enjoy a big revival in Europe. They are much cheaper to build than underground trains and, provided the traffic lights are arranged in their favour, about as fast as them. Interestingly, tramways were standard in East Berlin (the west had undergrounds) for the same reasons: cheaper and why save street space for the cars when the population cannot afford a car anyway?
6: last but not least, public transport is not always that different between Europe and the USA. Europe has two things which the USA does not have:
- dense underground systems in large cities
- high speed passenger trains.
Most of the time, the dense underground systems are there for historical reasons as they were built in the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century, at a time when the USA did not have cities large enough to justify their cost. Also: the historical centre of many European city is so densely populated that such underground systems are a necessity and can pay themselves.
High-speed passenger trains were developed originally to compete against air transportation. Here the conditions are quite different between the USA and Europe, simply because the USA is a much larger country. High-speed trains make sense when distances are about 500 km, airplanes make sense over 1000 km.
OTOH, commuter trains are not that different between the USA and Europe (when they exist, of course). I have taken commuter trains in Chicago and New York and could have thought myself in Paris or Berlin: they were about as slow, noisy and inconvenient.
Also: the article does not make a difference between public transport and mass transport, but the difference is essential. Underground only makes sense as a mass transport system, because of the prohibitively expensive infrastructure maintenance costs. Mass transport in large, densely populated cities makes sense to mitigate pollution as cities like Bangkok or Lagos show. Public transport is often something different, as the example of Switzerland shows. There, public transport is designed as an alternative to cars and goes to every small village with a combination of trains, postal busses and even on-demand busses in some cases.
