Recently, I visited my grandparents' house in Denton, Texas. Back in 2011, Denton opened a light rail line called the A-train, and while it does a solid job shuttling commuters into downtown Dallas, it has limited use as an actual transit service for people living in Denton County. And to be honest, that's the problem with suburban public transit services. The services work great for the 9-to-5 commuter, but they leave everyone else in the community stranded. The reality is that public transportation in the suburbs works poorly because of a lot of interconnected issues: suburban sprawl and low density of the suburbs, the first and last mile problem, employment centers being scattered in various places instead of converging in one central downtown area, and the funding issues that make it impossible to build a comprehensive transit network. Suburban transit systems are a one-trick pony: they work well for a niche subsection of the population and fail the rest of the community it was built to serve.

Suburban communities are built around the car. It's that plain and simple, all you have to do is take a look outside. Houses sit on large lots, commercial strip malls line strides with massive parking lots, and everything is spread out in a way that makes walking a hassle. To have effective transit you need a large population base. You need to have enough workers and people living within walking distance of stops to justify frequent service. In large cities, you might have thousands of people living and working within a quarter mile of a subway stop. In the suburbs, you might be lucky to have 300 or 400 people captured in that same radius, and most of them already own multiple cars. Running frequent bus or rail service through areas where houses sit on half-acre lots and strip malls are separated by seas of asphalt means you're operating routes with too few riders to justify the cost, which leads to infrequent service, making the system even less appealing to potential riders. Transit planners usually have a threshold of 6 to 8 housing units per acre to make bus transit justifiable, and much higher standards for rail. Most suburban neighborhoods in places like Denton don't even come close. You're looking at 2 to 4 units per acre at best, and that's in newer, more dense subdivisions. Older suburban areas with larger lots have around 1 unit per acre or less. At those densities, a bus route might serve only a few dozen households per mile of service, and there's no reasonable frequency that makes the system attractive enough to entice people to stop driving their cars. The problem exacerbates itself when you realize that density isn't just about residential areas, it's about commercial areas as well. A truly functional suburban transit system requires a network of dense residential neighborhoods feeding into dense commercial areas, mixed-use projects, and entertainment spaces. The whole environment needs to be walkable to justify transit. But most suburbs in America lack this density. In American suburban environments, you might have pockets of density through apartment complexes and townhomes and senior living centers but when the pharmacy or grocery store is surrounded by giant half mile parking lots and you have to cross a 6 lane road to get there it creates an environment where even if you do have some density, the environment doesn't foster the walkability for transit to work. You might have 500 people willing to take a bus, but if the bus only comes once an hour and takes 45 minutes to get anywhere useful because it’s winding through endless cul-de-sacs and collector roads, those 500 people are going to keep driving. The problem with density relating to suburban transit is that there's not enough of it. We need a whole ecosystem, neighborhoods of medium-density housing and business to support a reliable and good transit system. We need to support and get behind large mixed-use developments and fight back against NIMBYS (Not In My Backyard) who are fearful of change. We need to fight to make sure our developments are not watered down versions of the original plans. Having everyone live on a third of an acre with three car garages will not support a robust transit system. We need to push for sustainable policies putting pedestrians first to help create an ecosystem of density, if we actually want make our suburbs have transit that works.

When we push for and create density, it solves other problems like a lack of a centralized suburban downtown and the first and last mile problem. In Denton and other suburban communities, jobs are scattered everywhere around the town and the surrounding community. In Denton, there's an office park off Highway 121, a hospital campus near I-35, retail clusters along University Drive, jobs at the universities, and still some jobs downtown. This wide array of employment locations means that transit can’t run to a couple of centralized locations and call it a day. Because of the way suburbs were built, people need to get from one suburb to another, from sprawling residential subdivisions to distant employment centers. Creating an efficient transit network to serve all of these people would create an extremely complex mesh of routes that would have to have enough frequency to even be useful. And still, all of these routes are struggling with the problem of low density. When you combine that challenge across dozens of potential pairs instead of a single downtown hub, the economics become completely undesirable. The cost would be astronomical, and even then, most trips would require multiple transfers and take twice as long as driving. While the A-Train works for commuters commuting into downtown Dallas, it does not work for the vast majority of the population. It does nothing for the commuter who needs to go from Denton to the outlet mall in Grapevine, the Amazon warehouse in Fort Worth, or the technology park in Plano. These trips have to be done by car because of the scatteredness of the locations. But when we create higher-density areas, business seems to concentrate there. Just look at Covington, Kentucky, since deciding to revitalize their downtown through density and pedestrian friendly public planning the city has reported a consolidation of jobs in the downtown area and a job growth of 1,738 jobs. When we build density, it allows for jobs to be concentrated in specific locations and public transit to more easily move large numbers of suburban commuters to and from work. Building density also solves the first and last-mile problem. So what is the first and last mile problem? It’s a problem where riders do not take transit because it is hard to get to their local station or hard to get to their destination from their final stop.  Let's say you do take the A-Train from Denton to Downtown Dallas. In order to get to the station in Downtown Denton, most residents have to walk for a significant amount of time to get there. Take where my grandparents live, for example. If they wanted to take the train, they would have to walk for around 50 minutes to get to the station. For most residents, because of low-density housing, getting to transit stations is a hassle. This makes ridership go down and people more reliant on their cars. Cities have tried to fix this problem with park-and-ride stations, but this just makes the situation worse. They have created a situation where transit is most useful for people who already own cars and are choosing to leave them at home. They are disenfranchising people who are trying to use transit for anything other than a downtown commute; the first and last mile problem makes the system nearly worthless. You can't get to the grocery store, you can't get to the doctor's office, you can't get to your kid's school, because none of those destinations are within walking distance due to the lack of a transit network. In order to solve this problem, we need to build density around our stations. When they do that, more people begin to be in walking distance, and more shops and restaurants become easier to access through transit. 

Finally, the final reason why suburban public transit is poor is the cost of building the infrastructure necessary and the reluctance to fund it. Public transportation is extremely expensive. In Kansas City, officials recently expanded their streetcar line by 3.5 miles for over 100 million dollars per mile. While in Kansas City, that extension is an outlier in costs due to it being separated from street traffic, the cost of building transit is still absurdly expensive. The political coalition that supports robust transit investment in cities is a mix of urban professionals, environmental advocates, and residents without cars that lacks the political power to push through funding initiatives. Suburban voters tend to be car owners who see transit as something for urban people. And when you consider the density, first-and-last-mile, and scattered employment challenges that we've already covered, they're not entirely wrong. For most suburban residents, transit doesn't and can't serve their daily transportation needs, given the environment they live in. This creates a dynamic where suburban transit systems are constantly under scrutiny and pressure to justify themselves, while the underlying conditions make it nearly impossible for them to hit the performance metrics that would secure continued funding. Suburban transit fails because it's underfunded, and it's underfunded because it fails. There's also the reality that suburban political leadership often doesn't actually want transit to succeed too much, because transit implies density, and even medium density threatens the car-centric culture that residents value. Transit-oriented development might help solve the ridership problem, but it also brings the exact urban qualities of apartment buildings, mixed-use development, walkable streets, and less parking that many suburban voters oppose. So you end up with transit projects that are politically acceptable but functionally compromised, designed to serve commuters heading downtown without fundamentally changing the suburban landscape. The result is systems like the A-train: functional enough to claim success, but limited enough that they don't actually serve as meaningful transportation for most residents. And because these systems are expensive to build and operate while serving a niche population, they make it politically harder to fund the kind of comprehensive transit network that might actually work if such a thing is even possible in an American suburban context.

We need to reckon with an uncomfortable truth that, for most suburban areas, traditional fixed-route transit is simply the wrong service for suburban environments. If we can build medium-density and solve the problems of low density, scattered employment centers, high costs and the first and last mile problem, then transit works amazingly and should be built. But for most cities, that is not possible. The reward does not outweigh the cost, and suburban transit is unfortunately doomed to fail without radical increases in density. 

This article was edited by Amaan Musani.