Interesting question... why indeed did mass transit fade away? At least in a number of cities (East San Francisco Bay, San Jose, Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles), it was because the automotive industry did to the rail industry, what the rail industry had done to the canals in the East - they bought them up and closed them ...

For our anniversary my wife wanted to go someplace expensive, so we went to a gas station. When that joke made the rounds recently it dawned on me that I’d heard it before — in the 1970s. It was then that the inflation-adjusted price of crude oil was well on its way toward the same altitude it occupies today. In the intervening years, ...

Regular readers of our letters column may have noticed a discussion about people movers and mass transit. To some, mass transit seems like a good way to conserve energy and fossil fuels. A few writers have argued that properly engineered mass-transit lines would be more energy efficient than even hybrid vehicles. There have been ...