Reddit reviews Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

Lifetime (31 years) Phoenician here. As already said Tokyo is the complete opposite of urban sprawl. It is one of the biggest, most densly populated metros in the world. I spent a week wandering around Tokyo by myself a couple years ago. After a lifetime in Phoenix I was amazed at just how many people are jammed into the metro and how clean and efficient the place is. I love living in Phoenix (Scottsdale), but hate what it has become. A professor at New York University put out a book last month on Phoenix and how unsustainable it is. Good read.

Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Fire-Lessons-Worlds-Sustainable/dp/0199828261

It's not the first time that Phoenix has been given that designation.

This book is really well known: Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World's Most Unsustainable City

Well, there could be a lot of factors determining sub-par mass transit in an urban area. At the most basic level it could be lack of funding. In WA state we dealt with this over ten years ago with Tim Eyman's I-695 which in my area cut mass transit funding 50%. When you have a group of voters who say "fuck it" to funding bus/light rail you're going to have progressively worse service.

Another aspect is urban congestion. If you are running a bus line without dedicated lanes in a dense downtown region (or the center of an auto-centric sprawl city like Atlanta) it's going to back up and cause delayed routes, more gas consumption, and longer rides. Light rail, commuter rail, and BRT can move faster in most locations but require a larger investment (more money per mile of service, which won't happen if voters turn down taxes and bonds for it). Also factor in the continued sprawling out of cities like Phoenix, which requires more money to service fewer riders due to low density.

It's funny now because many cities are opting to re-implement the trolley lines they so quickly tore up in the 40's/50's/60's, albeit at a cost. When you had cities growing organically with an urban core that included housing followed by streetcar neighborhoods, the transportation system was integrated into the environment (you walked in downtown, took a streetcar to home/visit in the peripheral neighborhoods). The streetcars were tracked and had the right of way. When the cities tore the tracks up and placed their buses within the street traffic, which would become more congested than we could have ever imagined, in many cases we see them giving up a dedicated right of way for transit and forcing their vehicles right into the shark tank, so to say.

The post-war boom that fueled auto production/purchase coupled with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 swelled the streets with cars and kicked off the suburban sprawl that still persists today (although the numbers have lowered significantly since the 1990's and took a sharp decline since 2008). A few good books on these subjects include: Suburban Nation, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, and How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken Here are a few about specific cities with high amounts of sprawl that go into what factors caused this and the problems faced today: The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City (which I am reading right now and can say so far is a really interesting history of the city).