Author Jake Berman surmises that "Ideally, mass transit should do four things. One, it should be frequent; two it should be fast; three, it should be reliable; and four, it should go where people want to go." (p. 169). In chapters on 23 cities in the United States and Canada, Berman summarizes where each city succeeds and more often fails to meet one or more of those requirements. Despite the title, Berman focuses on more than just underground heavy rail metro systems, but also elevated rail, light rail, trolleys/streetcars, busways, the now extinct interurban rail systems, and some rarer oddities that exist or have existed in these cities (such as Detroit's people mover to nowhere).

More often than not, this book documents failures. How did Los Angeles lose the "largest electric railway system in the world," and how did Rochester become the only city in the world to build a subway and then abandon it. Cities from Atlanta to Detroit to Miami to Seattle have seen audacious plans to construct extensive networks destroyed by suburban intransigence, racial prejudice, financial mismanagement, and endless deliberation. Berman also highlights the importance of land use as cities like Cleveland and Dallas have built transit lines that fail because they don't go where anyone lives or works. Even cities like Boston and New York that were successful in building extensive metro networks a century ago have struggled to replicate that with new extensions, as told in the latter's sad saga of the Second Avenue Subway. There are some success stories though, with Pittsburgh improvising an extensive system of busways while Vancouver built the only elevated system that people actually like.

The book is richly illustrated with Berman's system maps of what could've been as well as the current reality, done in the style of cartography appropriate to the time period of discussion. ( )

Quite interesting, though the format of going alphabetic by city works against some of the repeated themes ( )