Hark, Canada, to the sound of the Great Flush of 2012.

The rumbling began with the resignations of the mayors of Quebec's two largest cities, following allegations of systemic corruption cynical enough to turn - temporarily at least - my anger into amazement. (To give you an idea: After a senior city engineer could no longer find any more room to hide wads of banknotes in his home, he took to gambling away his kickbacks at the Casino de Montréal. "It was my way of putting this money back into the coffers of the state," he explained to the Charbonneau Commission.)

It continued this week with the burbling of Rob Ford, mayor of this nation's economic and demographic powerhouse, being washed out of office, perhaps permanently, following conflict-of-interest charges. The whirlpool may yet overwhelm the mayor of London, Ont., who faces conflict-of-interest charges of his own, and Winnipeg's Sam Katz, who is set to go to court next year for allegations of fraud. The risk, of course, is that not even a cloaca maxima will be able to handle the outflow. Decades of neglect means that, in the case of my hometown of Montreal, the sewers are so rotten that most of our municipal effluvia leaches directly into the earth.

What did our cities do to deserve the kind of leaders that I, personally, wouldn't trust to oversee a crosswalk in Cape Breton? The problem is partly a made-in-Canada one, going back to British North America Act, which made cities relatively powerless, and chronically underfunded, vassals of the provinces - meaning that, since 1867, political talent has been more likely to gravitate toward provincial or federal office. It is also, alas, a problem that afflicts all of North America, where intellectuals and opinion-leaders for too long turned their back on thinking seriously about the city and its future.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise...

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A massive storm blows in from the Atlantic, bringing the commercial capital of the western hemisphere to a complete standstill. Ferries stop running, trains are immobilized, and in several boroughs, fires rage out of control. "New York", a reporter at the New York Times marvels, is as "completely isolated from the rest of the world as if Manhattan Island was in the middle of the South Sea." Seeing their city utterly paralyzed by an act of nature, officials who tour the blacked-out neighborhoods immediately call for a massive investment in better transportation.

The tempest in question was not Hurricane Sandy, but the "Great White Hurricane", a blizzard that, in the early days of March 1888, wreaked havoc on the eastern seaboard and brought 22in of snow and 80mph wind gusts to New York City. The storm also brought an end to two decades of dickering about infrastructure: from then on, electrical cables and telegraph cables would be buried, and the elevated trains on the avenues, whose steam engines were extinguished by the gale, would be replaced by a weather-proof underground railroad, on the lines of the one already running in London.

But the most lasting impact of the Blizzard of '88 was the building of the IRT, the first line in what would become, in the 20th century, the world's most extensive subway system. Never again would the great city of New York allow itself to be paralyzed by a simple act of nature.

Now, as the Army Corps of Engineers flies in 250 pumps to drain tunnels filled floor-to-ceiling with water, and service haltingly resumes on 14 of the city's 23 subway lines, New Yorkers are being reminded of how completely they have come to rely on public transport for going about the day-to-day business of their lives.

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When I pocketed my first driver's licence, in Vancouver in the '80s, Bruce Springsteen's paeans to the highways ruled the airwaves (all those "Broken heroes on a last-chance power drive!"), Stephen King's Christine was playing at the drive-ins (High-school geek falls in love with Haunted Homicidal Plymouth!) and cars, along with New Coke and Joe Camel, were being exuberantly marketed as a must-have gateway drug to full-fledged adulthood. All that hype had an impact: back then, my idea of a great summer vacation was a road trip down the I-5 to Tijuana in a gas-guzzling Oldsmobile — our version of On the Road, with punk rock on the cassette deck instead of jazz on the radio. Car ownership promised popularity, independence from the overbearing 'rents, and, if you played your cards right, a little back seat romance. Though I never owned a car myself, my closest friend slaved at three jobs to buy a '66 Barracuda, and ended up having its logo tattooed on his bicep. Cars, simply put, were cool.

How times have changed. Among teenagers, driving to school in the family car now has far less cachet than showing up with the latest MP3 player, tablet, or smartphone. In the United States, less than a third of 16-year-olds now have drivers' licenses, versus half in 1978, and across the continent, vehicle miles travelled, the most reliable measure of automobile dependence available, have been in free fall since the middle of last decade. Car sales are down 20 per cent from their peak in 2000, and the declines have been sharpest among the young, who, in recessionary times, can't afford all the lures carmakers are so desperately dangling ("eco-friendly" hybrids, Bluetooth, satellite radio, and iPod docks). In poll after poll, the majority of young people say they would rather have Internet access or a data plan than a car of their own. En masse, the largest demographic out there — the Millennials now outnumber the Boomers — are turning their backs on modernity's ultimate consumer item: the private automobile.

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I'd come to Moscow not only to see the hell emerging on its streets but also to see the paradise beneath them—and because no straphanger's round-the-world journey would be complete without a trip to the legendary Moscow underground. New York's subway has grit, London's Tube has history, and Paris's Métropolitain has glamour. But Moscow's Metro, I'd been told, had something I'd never seen in an urban transit system: full-on, unabashed splendor.

I knew I would need a guide to this sprawling museum. Anastasia, in her late twenties, fluent in English and French, had volunteered to play the docent, and we'd arranged to meet at the terrace of a café surrounded by musical conservatories, a ten-minute walk from the Kremlin gates.

I apologized for arriving late. "You took taxi?" she said. "From now on, take Metro. Is fastest. With Metro, you can be anywhere in Moscow in thirty minutes. When you take car, you can never be sure."

The tour began at Komsomolskaya station. After pausing to applaud a sloppily dressed string quintet's precisely rendered version of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, we followed the crowds to a line in front of a ticket booth in a high-ceilinged vestibule. As my turn approached, Anastasia whispered a magic incantation into my ear; I repeated it, and the woman behind the glass handed me a cardboard ticket.

"Diesyet bileti," ten tickets, is the "Open, Sesame" that unlocks the gates to Moscow.

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In 1938, the great photographer Walker Evans boarded what he called the "swaying sweatbox" of the New York subway with a Contax camera strapped to his chest. Riding up, down, and crosstown on the IRT, BMT, and IND, Evans used his hidden camera to shoot the unposed faces of New York's commuters lost in reverie, conversation, or the pages of The Daily News. Befurred matrons, delivery boys with furrowed brows, wimpled nuns, African-American men with silk ascots -- for three years, the lens poking between the two top buttons his topcoat captured New York's commuters, in glorious 35 mm black-and-white, and in all their humanity and individuality.

The author and critic James Agee, who wrote an essay that accompanied the photos (later published in book form as Many are Called), saw New York's subway riders as "members of every race and nation of the earth. They are of all ages, of all temperaments, of all classes, of almost every imaginable occupation... Each, also, is an individual existence, as matchless as a thumbprint or a snowflake."

Ayn Rand perceived something very different in New York's subway riders: not humanity, but the herd. In The Fountainhead, which was written at the same time Evans and Agee were collaborating, the best-selling egoist describes a character picking up the scent of commuters through a sidewalk grate: "an odor of dust, sweat and dirty clothing, worse than the smell of stockyards." For Rand, it was also the smell of the mediocrities who had no choice but to ride public transit: "the anonymous, the unselected." (Though Rand had a special horror of the subway, she never learned to drive; she spent her life being driven around.)

The question of whether straphangers are the salt, or the scum, of the earth, is an old one, and the answer has always revealed more about an observer's ideology than it has about the realities of moving around the metropolis.

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I've spent the last three years traveling to 14 cities around the world, looking at how places as diverse as Copenhagen, Tokyo and Bogota are trying to escape congestion, pollution and sprawl by finding alternatives to the car. When people ask me which major U.S. city is at the cutting edge of forward-thinking transportation planning, they're always surprised when I reply that it is Los Angeles — those "72 suburbs in search of a city," according to the tired put-down — that is working hardest to improve transit. Some express astonishment that transit is an option in L.A. at all, which leads me to soliloquize, a la Joan Didion, on the "rapture-of-the-freeway" and the joys of strap-hanging in SoCal.

L.A. has a two-line subway, I tell them, running trains through cavernous stations, like the one at Hollywood and Vine, where the ceilings are covered with oversized film reels. (You can actually get to the Oscars by subway!) The Orange Line's buses shoot into the heart of the San Fernando Valley along dedicated busways. The articulated, air-conditioned buses look like something dreamed up by the set designer of "RoboCop"!) Connecting on one of the city's four light-rail lines can take you from Pasadena to Mariachi Plaza in East Los Angeles, or from Culver City to the Long Beach Aquarium. When you're downtown, or in more than a dozen other neighborhoods, you can hop a ride on the peppy, pint-sized DASH buses. (And get this: The fare is only half a buck!)

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Margaret Thatcher earned the undying enmity of the world's transit users when she said (in her sexist and condescending way), that any "man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

Following the former Prime Minister's calculus, that makes me a loser of almost two decades' standing. But I'm not afraid to admit it: I ride the bus. What's more, I frequently find myself on subways, streetcars, light rail, metros, and high-speed trains. I've never owned an automobile, and though I'm no anti-car zealot (I belong to my city's car share program, and dutifully pay to renew my license every year) I'm proud to call myself a straphanger: somebody who relies on public transit for most of his or her urban travel.

I'm not alone. Half the population of New York, Toronto, and London do not own cars, and transit is how most of the people of Asia and Africa, the world's most populous continents, travel. In North America, the Millennial generation, who now outnumber the Boomers, are fleeing the 'burbs for old city centers by the millions, and have far fewer hang-ups about fare cards and bus passes than their parents' generation. (A recent survey found that half of American teenagers would now rather have a new smartphone than a new car. Makes sense: armed with a new iPhone or Android, they can download apps that will tell them exactly when the next bus or train will get to the stop.) Last year, ridership on the New York subway surpassed 1.6 billion, the most trips since the boom years after the Second World War. Meanwhile, though the U.S. population continues to grow, vehicle miles traveled, the most reliable indicator of automobile dependency we have, have been in decline for the last seven years.

In the three years that I've spent traveling the world researching my book Straphanger, nothing I've found makes me believe the car has any future as a plausible form of mass transit for our cities.

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