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Public transport policies in most industrialised countries are currently under enormous pressure to satisfy often contradictory demands, caught between social equity and environmental concerns. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, various powerful lobbies are explicitly and successfully fighting the expansion of the rail system, considered detrimental to the development of the bus network, in political battles that have often been resolved in Court. While these battles seem surprising to the foreign observer, as they do not target automobile domination, they highlight the socio-spatial and institutional dynamics at play in American urban space.