| My experience is that the US has awful public transit, with the arguable exception of NYC, purely because of its subway. Here's the stats for Berlin vs Washington, as you wanted to make the comparison. Berlin subway (U-Bahn) has 10 lines, 94km (route length).
Berlin trams have 22 lines, 190km. Washington Metro has 6 lines, 118km.
No trams (under construction?). I'm excluding the S-Bahn, as Washington doesn't have anything comparable. Berlin's subway alone carries about 500 million passengers a year, versus 200 million on the Washington metro. The difference in this case is quite easily explained by density of population - Washington is much smaller than Berlin, with 700k vs 3.5 million. However, this doesn't explain why other US cities have such poor public transit. If you look at the numbers transported by American metro (subway) systems, there are 18 subway systems in Europe that carry more passengers than Chicago, the USA's second busiest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems |
DC is building a streetcar system. The H Street line is basically done and the streetcars are running, but there are issues to work out before it can officially open. Poor project management made it take forever and ended up having neighboring jurisdictions (Arlington) cancel their streetcar plans.
>The difference in this case is quite easily explained by density of population - Washington is much smaller than Berlin, with 700k vs 3.5 million. DC is not less dense than Berlin is. DC is about the same density, actually. What DC is is small: DC is ~69 square miles vs 344 square miles for Berlin. The Metro actually travels relatively far into the suburbs covering far more than just DC itself (DC again being really tiny).
What is much less dense is the surrounding area. Arlington and Alexandria (both part of DC at one point, but now part of VA) are also relatively dense by US standards (especially where the Metro goes; many people do not own cars or own one car per family) but outside of those and a few other pockets of density most of the region is significantly less dense and thus the number of trips is lower.
Also, the DC area does have two commuter rails systems: MARC and VRE, run by Maryland and Virginia respectively. MARC reaches all the way to West Virginia. Based on a cursory browsing of Wikipedia (so it must be true) this seems to be what the S-Bahn is. Not sure how comparable they are though.
> However, this doesn't explain why other US cities have such poor public transit.
Many parts of the US experienced growth after cars came on the scene, and the infrastructure was designed with them in mind. This has since been shown to be a bad thing, but at the time it seemed like the way cities of the future should be built.
From then on, local governments basically mandated suburban living. Places like New York, DC, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. grew up before the car and so weren't ruined. Their suburbs may have been, but the cities themselves weren't. We are now trying to undo the damage.