Five takeaways from Chapter 1 (and the Introduction) of Taras Grescoe's Straphanger:

2012 was a long time ago. Many of the things Grescoe talks about from way back in 2012 would have seemed strangely out of place in 2019—doubly so during this current moment of 2020. This bit about gas prices especially stood out: "In the summer of 2008, the price of a barrel of crude oil spiked to $147 a historic high. Since then, a gallon of gas, which could be had for under a dollar for most of the 1990s, has routined retailed for $4.50 at some pumps." With current gas prices under $2 and expected uncertainty around oil prices, if anything, gas prices have encouraged more driving.
These two sentences are great: "While I love the gritty allure of a great metropolitan subway, and consider a rail trip one of life's great pleasures, my interest in transportation technology runs a distant second to my love of cities. Simply put, I like subways, buses, and trains because I believe they make better places than cars and freeways."
If you want to get really, really into why the cost of building public transportation in the United State is so high ("The price tag for extending New York's subway network by just one mile in the early years of the twenty-first century? Just over two billion dollars"), you should subscribe to Alon Levy's blog.
Grescoe has a whole section about the history of transit in New York, including a bunch of stuff about horses: "By 1860, when fourteen horse-railway companies were carrying 38 million passengers a year..." If that blows your mind, read this long piece about America's shift from horse-based transportation to motorized vehicles.
Maybe, at some point, we should read the Robert Moses biography, _The Power Broker_

If you're following along, we'll be reading chapters two and three next week and posting thoughts / comments on Twitter.