Trains and big cities are more efficient on a typical cost basis than cars. The operating costs of trains are such that even the unsubsidized costs of big-city metros and bus networks are a fraction of those of cars. For example, New York City Transit, despite its high operating costs, manages to serve a linked trip for around $6, which works out to an annual cost per user of around $3,500, and if it had the cost structure of London or Berlin this would be $2,000 or a bit less than that; American cars average $7,000/car per year in private spending.

And yet, cars have one singular advantage: they commoditize location. Public transit ideally works in large cities at specific locations, based on historic contingencies like national capitals, religious significance, or river crossings and harbors that may no longer be relevant with modern technology. It’s decommoditized, in that there is only one New York, one Philadelphia, one Chicago, etc., and the cost of moving is high. Public transit itself doesn’t lend itself to competition, because it requires extensive scale to ensure connectivity and high frequency. This is why public provision is almost universal, and the exceptions either involve a high degree of public coordination such as the Verkehrsverbünde in the German-speaking world even if elements are contracted out or are Japanese cities with such large systems that competition between a JR and a private operator still leaves each competitor with much scale; even generally privatization-happy states like Singapore keep the systems broadly public in planning.

What this means is that cities and public transit require a public sector that can keep up without the discipline of market competition. This means public-sector innovation, with competition taking place in the political sphere as in European cities or in the technocratic one as in Singapore. If this doesn’t happen, then the system suffers. If, for example, the New York MTA folds to a strike by the LIRR train drivers in which the union demands are so unreasonable that even the left-wing city mayor Zohran Mamdani doesn’t side with the union, and gives the drivers large increases in pay while still allowing them to collect double pay for driving both a diesel and an electric train, then there’s no easy way to move to a competitor.

Cars and suburbs instead commoditize location. If the city can’t provide adequate public services, people can just leave. It’s particularly easy if the municipality that falters in providing services is not a large city but a small suburb of one, as in the boroughitis of New Jersey. Cars facilitate that, in that they scale down better. There’s no way to squeeze anything the size of Midtown Manhattan or even the center of Paris into one auto-oriented place (Los Angeles has a weak central business district), but that’s fine, a region can take the hit on income and still function with worse scale; Dallas is not a poor region. There are real problems in this setup with higher transportation costs and with job centers with worse scale, but sometimes it’s worth it to take the hit if it means not having to deal with unaccountable government that one can’t leave. If there’s no mechanism to improve governance – say, if there is such democratic deficit at the local level that it’s not possible for voters to coerce the city into improving education or public transit or housing or any other devolved issue – then that usually equally affects city and suburbs, but one can move from one suburb to another at relatively low economic and social cost, and this has a disciplining effect to some extent.