This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If you've spent any amount of time driving through any major American city,

you know what it's like to be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic.

The experience of crawling along, listening to people honking,

and feeling your soul leaving your body.

But no one, no one understands this pain better than someone from Los Angeles.

I got stuck in traffic on the 101 freeway through Hollywood.

And I was thinking to myself, what am I doing behind this guy in a jeep

with too many bumper stickers and why hasn't my car moved for half an hour?

This is Jake Berman.

He used to live in LA, so he understands this struggle all too well.

But as Jake discovered, it didn't have to be this way.

I found a very old map that was put out as publicity by the old Pacific Electric Railway

that owned this massive electric railway system, and as part of their advertising they had in

huge letters the largest electric railway system in the world and this flipped a switch in my head because this is Los Angeles.

What Jay quickly learned is that LA hasn't always been the car-centric city we know today.

It was home to a massive public transit network.

At one time, Los Angeles of all places,

the land of freeways, traffic, and smog had an electric railway system that was four times

the size of the modern London underground.

So I was thinking to myself, what happened here? And so as I went down the rabbit hole I found that this was the common story in North America like nowhere else in the world that the United States and Canada to a lesser extent abandoned mass transit in a way that other industrialized countries didn't.

This experience inspired Jake to write The Lost Subways of North America, a book about the subways of our past, present, and future,

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