In 1916 the United States had 15,580 miles of electric interurban railway, the largest such network ever built. By 1959 it had 209. The streetcars went the same way in the same years. This page is about what that cost, what the countries that kept their railways have now, what a working transit system does for the people who live near one, and what a single person can usefully do about it. Every figure on it is sourced in the sentence that uses it.
Not a metaphor and not a myth. The numbers below are counts of track, taken from the industry’s own directories and the standard history, and they describe a country that once had frequent electric rail in nearly every city of any size.
The interurbans were the fast ones: electric railways that ran between towns at speeds the steam railroads matched only on their main lines, and that stopped in the middle of every village on the way. George Hilton and John Due, whose 1960 account remains the standard reference, put the network at 15,580 route-miles at its 1916 peak (Hilton & Due, via Wikipedia). By 1940, the Dictionary of American History records, at most 4,000 miles remained — a quarter of the peak. Hilton and Due’s own count, as summarised by American-Rails, has 1,519 miles by 1950 and 209 by 1959.
The streetcars were bigger still. Working from the McGraw street-railway directories, Li, Lahoorpoor and Levinson find that US street railway track reached an observed maximum of 50,120 miles in 1918, and that 152 metropolitan areas had systems of at least a hundred miles each (Findings, 2026). By the 1960s, the first-generation streetcar survived in seven US cities: Boston, Cleveland, New Orleans, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco (Wikipedia, “Streetcars in North America”). Everywhere else, the tracks were paved over and a bus was put on the route, and within a decade most of those bus routes carried a fraction of what the cars had.
The last car, by city, 1940–1966: the year each city’s principal electric streetcar operator ran its final service, from the dated entries in Wikipedia’s list of US streetcar systems. Twenty-seven of the fifty-four metros in the game are on this rail; the game’s earliest decade, 1920, is the last one in which all of them still ran.
Switzerland, Japan, Austria and France rebuilt and electrified through the same decades the United States was paving over track. The gap today is not a matter of taste. It is an order of magnitude, and it shows up in how far people travel by rail, how they get to work, and how many of them die on the roads.
One more number for scale. American transit carried 7.7 billion boardings in 2024 (APTA, 2024 Public Transportation Fact Book, reported by Mass Transit), which sounds like a great deal until it is divided by 340 million people: about 23 boardings per American per year, or one every two weeks. The average Swiss resident covers more ground on a train in a fortnight than the average American does in a year.
Six measured effects, each from a named study. They are not projections and they are not the game’s model: they are what has been observed where frequent transit already exists.
Across seven US regions between 2012 and 2016, homes within half a mile of heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail or bus rapid transit sold for 4 to 24 percent more than the regional median. Commercial property in four of the seven was 5 to 42 percent higher per square foot.
APTA and the National Association of Realtors, “The Real Estate Mantra” (2019)
Transportation is the second-largest thing American households buy: 17.0 percent of spending, $13,174 a year, behind only housing (BLS Consumer Expenditures 2023). APTA’s comparison of fares against car ownership and parking across twenty cities puts the saving for a two-person household that drops one car at more than $13,000 a year.
APTA, Transit Savings Report (September 2023), via Metro Magazine
Todd Litman’s analysis for APTA finds transit travel ten times safer per mile than travel by car, and transit-oriented communities with about a fifth the per-capita traffic casualty rate of car-oriented ones — not because riders are safer people, but because fewer cars at lower speeds hurt fewer people, riders and non-riders alike.
Litman for APTA, “The Hidden Traffic Safety Solution” (2016), via Mobility Lab
Americans who use transit on a given day walk a median of 19 minutes to and from it, and 29 percent of them reach the recommended thirty minutes of daily physical activity on that walking alone. The effect is strongest for rail riders and for households without a car.
Besser & Dannenberg, American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2005), from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey
The Federal Transit Administration’s accounting puts a private car at 0.96 pounds of CO₂ per passenger-mile, a bus at 0.64, light rail at 0.36, commuter rail at 0.33 and heavy rail at 0.22. The game charges your network for its own emissions for the same reason the FTA does: an empty bus is worse than a car.
FTA, “Public Transportation’s Role in Responding to Climate Change” (2010)
APTA’s 2026 economic analysis finds that every dollar invested in public transportation generates about five dollars of long-term economic value, and that each billion dollars supports 41,400 jobs across construction, manufacturing and operations. Separately, Brookings found the typical resident of a large US metro can reach only 30 percent of the region’s jobs by transit within ninety minutes (“Missed Opportunity”, 2011) — which is the gap the investment closes.
APTA, “Economic Impact of Public Transportation Investment” (February 2026), via Citizens for Modern Transit
Every line in the game is a line somebody had to argue for at a public meeting on a weeknight, against people who had driven there. The arguments on this page are the ones that carry. Here is where to make them.
Ridership is the only statistic a board cannot argue with, and every count is taken on an ordinary Tuesday. A trip you make is a trip in the number. If the service is bad, ride it anyway and then say so, in writing, to the agency.
Sales-tax measures, bond authorisations, county boards, city councils: the decisions in this game are made by elected bodies most people cannot name. Find out who sits on your transit agency’s board and who appoints them.
Comment periods are decided by whoever turns up, and the people who turn up to oppose a line are reliable. Two minutes at a microphone saying “I live here and I would ride this” is worth more than it feels like.
The organisations below read the budgets, track the votes, and fill the room when it matters. Membership is the cheapest transit investment there is, and a tenth of what this game earns goes to groups like them.
Independent organisations, listed because of their work. None is affiliated with Interurban and none has endorsed it.
Figures checked 4 October 2026. The same register, with each source’s URL, is in data/advocacy.js. Where a publisher’s own page refused automated retrieval, the figure was read in the named report of it and the primary is still the one linked.
