[ghaff]

A couple of things.

1. A lot of existing big cities post-WWII did, in fact, grow commuter rail out to the expanding suburbs. If you live in the suburbs (say Westchester County in NY) and work at a bank in Manhattan, there is pretty good rail service.

2. But, a lot of the suburban expansion also included companies locating out in the suburbs. For a variety of reasons (including "white flight") a lot of cities became unpopular places for professionals to live so it made sense to locate companies where the people were. NYC almost went bankrupt. Boston was losing population into the 90s. So, for a significant period of time, you had a lot of people dispersed around suburbs (and still do) and that's hard to accommodate with transit.

In Boston, for example, there was not a single major tech employer in the city by the mid 90s or so--when Teradyne moved out--all the "Route 128" companies and others were in the suburbs/exurbs. (I would bet that, at least leaving out biotech/pharma, most tech employment in the Boston area is still in the suburbs--as indeed it is in the Bay Area.)

[gsanghera]

OK - interesting to know indeed. Thanks for the insights!