Hello. I enjoyed reading your post tremendously. Like you, I believe, as you have eloquently stated, that the key to resolving this issue is an integrated, intermodal approach with standardized fare structures. This cannot be achieved, however, without an in-depth analysis of how places like Wakefield and Far Rockaway evolved over the century leading up to 2012. Our evolutionary trajectory in North America has been vastly different than those of our cohorts in Europe or Asia.

I think it would be painting with an extra-wide brush to make comparisons with European and other systems and conclude that ‘Nobody Likes Riding North American Commuter Rail’. It’s not that easy. The assertions you make here are based on a way of looking at the evolution of societies and public transport in the US in complete isolation of socio-ethnic-economic indicators unique to Europe’s former colonies in the Americas, Asia and in Australia.

Wakefield and Far Rockaway were two areas of New York in which a massive wave of blockbusting and bank-sponsored redlining along the lines of race, concurrent with the abdication of local manufacturing and businesses occurred in the 1950s-1960s. The low ridership figures we see today are a direct result of this. I would be interested in seeing an analysis including the boarding and alighting statistics of both the Wakefield and Far Rockaway stops, from the century leading up to 2012, coupled with a demographics assessment of the surrounding areas. Of particular interest would be any statistics you could find from the 1920s through 1945.

We must examine the lay of the land prior to the advent of the centrality of the bus and the automobile in the five to ten mile radius around Wakefield and Far Rockaway Stations. The Cross Bronx Expressway and other Robert Moses-initiated projects in Queens violently uprooted thousands of New Yorkers in these areas, and disrupted the lives of millions. The scars are still here for all to see. Thousands and thousands of homes were demolished in order to build these roadways, which bisected and cut off everyone from everything familiar to them. The fabric of daily life was torn asunder and it has not recovered. If anything, it has only degenerated further. The massive exodus of educated middle-class and working class people from both of these areas as the jobs which once sustained the areas vanished cannot be ignored. This is a phenomenon which Europeans and Asians have never, ever experienced.

In the post-war, Marshall Plan era, both Europeans and Asians concertedly reconstructed their cities and towns in the multi-modal centrally-planned, integrated way they had always done. Not so their American counterparts, who, while the war was raging, ripped up a huge chunk of our rail infrastructure and drew up plans for highways designed to bisect and cut off neighborhoods from the power-centers of the cities and towns for good. Money flowed into Europe from the US to make all the necessary reconnection possible. By contrast, in the United States, in the Post-WWII period, all the money went towards disconnection and dissociation, in no small part because of the Great Migration of poor African Americans from the rural south to the north. All they wanted was a chance at a better future, and had our industrial base not fled our urban areas at the same time blacks were moving in, they would have found those opportunities. Fascism as a political force for social engineering in Europe was went quickly out of fashion as people picked up the pieces of their shattered lives, ajd rediscovered social solidarity and the intrinsic value of community. They restored and reconnected bombed railway lines. They modernized their infrastructure, beginning what would become a decades-long march to the unified public transport modalities and seamless operations of services we see In Europe and Asia today.

Here in the US by comparison, our logistics are still contending with the aftermath of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. It cannot be stressed enough that the 1950s while the influence of fascism quickly declined in Europe, in the US it grew substantially. The auto and oil industries were key players in a new fascism based on the disconnection of the American citizenry from one another. Men such as Henry Ford, Alfred P. Sloan, and Robert Moses delivered us into the disconnected, wildly impractical, expensive and irrational logistics nightmare with which we contend. This was not of our making as human beings and citizens. This was made by corporations which largely operated in a consequence-free environment utterly divorced from the environmental, social and economic realities of city dwellers.

There was once a massive web of electric streetcar and interurban lines which linked the subway and rail hubs of the five boroughs of New York City, not just with the tri-state area, with the entire Eastern Seaboard. They provided a near seamless integration with the web of subways and commuter and regional rail networks, rivaling even those in Europe. That is, up until they were destroyed by Standard Oil, Firestone Tires, and General Motors in the fiasco known as the National City Lines scandal.

Such a scandal is something which never, ever happened in Europe in quite the same way.

Hard-working middle and working class Americans who had savings and great civic pride were never involved in the decisions which were to destroy their communities from the inside out. A complex group of private, unaccountable manipulators of the political process led Americans into a decades-long trap of race baiting by committed, hateful dividers who made billions of dollars on destroying millions of American lives, engineering our own people into a paradigm of unsustainable living based on a taxpayer-subsidized, war-for-oil logistics equation. A small cadre of fascists worked through the ICC to systematically shutting down North America’s commuter and intercity passenger rail manufacturing and transportation industries, in favor of the motorcar in the years following the Kennedy Assassination.

The proof would be in the pudding. And the pudding is there for all to taste. Take a look at photos of people boarding at Wakefield and Far Rockaway from the 1930s, when streetcars and interurban lines were connected to the stations. Then, take a look at photos taken in the years following the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. We must no longer be unwitting accomplices in a domestic logistics model which has gutted our municipalities and disconnected the rail modality even from the mindset of the average American. This wasn’t the case at the time of our grandparents and great-grandparents. And this has never been the case in Europe or Asia. Ever.

I only have a general idea of Far Rockaway today. Wakefield I know a little better. I can tell you that it is a depressed area with no remaining manufacturing sector of great importance. The area is not too far from several important teaching hospitals, some doing vital bio-medical research. To be honest, while I agree with the your premise, I think we need to reassess the claims you have made in light of the socio-economic and social engineering factors above. Europe and Asian societies pull together because their histories have shown them this is the way to lift everyone and everything to a higher level. Up until today, they were also fairly homogenous in terms of racial composition. Americans were violently disconnected from one another during the post WWII McCarthy period by racists and for racists. The low overpasses on Long Island’s Parkways can attest to this, designed as they were, to keep city dwellers from getting too far by bus….

We must incorporate the aforementioned, missing chunk of the narrative in order to become the reconnectors our common humanity requires of us as we move forward. And we must be bold, dispassionate and frank with one another. It is sobering. It is depressing. And it is necessary in order that it never, ever be permitted to happen again. Statistics-oriented American urban planners and researchers can be shockingly timid in confronting the collective, Big Oil-engineered, Ayn Rand-informed fascist conspiracy to divide and conquer the American commuter. A decades-long pattern of redlining and internal migration, nationwide. An utter abdication of the social compact by industry and manufacturing and the simultaneous flooding into formerly prosperous communities of poor, unskilled, uneducated blacks coming north from the rural south and the West Indies looking for better opportunities. Communities which had begun to lose their tax bases a decade before the massive wave of unskilled, uneducated Hispanics began to flow into the Grand Concourse while affluent, educated Jews fled for Westchester County and Connecticut, becoming absentee slumlords during a period when urban planning and social engineering was concentrated in the hands of a very few, Ayn Rand-loving fascists at the top of the auto and oil industries.

It’s not racism to talk about these things. It’s history and it’s well-documented. It’s ugly. By definition, looking at our past dredges up pain and unresolved issues. But in order to move forward, we have to have to open dialogue and rebuild the bridges which others burnt before we were born. We’ve come a long way in many ways, but who amongst us thought that four years after electing our President, we’d still see so many of our fellow citizens so hell-bent on demanding proof of his citizenship and his religion?

All of us, regardless of race, religion, social status, etc. need to find out how to reconnect to one another. Those who divide and conquer the American people today know precisely what they’re doing, and though they’re achieving some of their objectives, I believe more and more people do see through what’s going on. Many of us feel powerless to do anything during this era of economic stagnation, where wealthy real estate investors with dubious motives, located in China, Russia and Europe conspire with predatory banks and lenders in continuing the pattern of re-draw the maps of our cities in their image. The dividers are as committed as ever to keeping Americans disconnected and isolated. It’s time to talk about these issues, to examine our painful collective past, to look one another in the eye, reconcile and join forces for a better future. We must stop making comparisons with our European and Asian cohorts, who didn’t experience in their societies what we experienced in ours in any way, shape or form in the modern era.

The process of reconnecting and reintegrating our towns and cities begins with an informed citizenry committed to truth and social justice. The right to free movement and association is a human right we reconnectors must reclaim massively.

Best regards to you, and to all who believe in and work for rational logistics in the name of the derivative social, economic and planetary harmony they most certainly promote.