Abstract
What do we make of the idea that the United States once possessed “the best transportation system in the world”? (Rose, Seely, and Barrett, p. 196). An excellent question, and one posed in one form or another by each of the four books reviewed here. As the United States looks toward a future marked by an uncertain petroleum supply, questions about how the country moves itself are becoming more numerous and more pointed. The sequence of decisions that led to a reduction in rail service to make room for automobiles, trucks, and airplanes created a transportation system that promised privacy and speed but often delivered only more congestion and frustration. The dominance of cars and planes helped fundamentally rearrange the urban landscape, giving rise to a collection of cities whose forms are urban only in the broadest sense of the word. Each of these books explores a facet of American transportation infrastructure and attempts to reveal the deeply political acts behind its planning and construction. The authors demonstrate how decisions that may appear irrational in retrospect were embedded in a political or pragmatic logic since forgotten.
Many assume that the existing American transportation system reflects the contours of a free market. In this view, changes in consumer behavior necessitated changes in the industries that supply consumer markets. In a terrifically complicated tripartite relationship, transportation systems, production systems, and consumption work together. As consumer demands change, so do the techniques of production. To satisfy the demands of production, transport systems shift. But as transport technologies change, new forms of consumption and production become possible. In a stepwise fashion, the feedback among these systems gradually reshapes the built environment. As new transportation technologies emerge over time, they compete with existing ones. If new forms of transportation are able to provide similar service at greater efficiencies, they outcompete existing forms and gradually replace them. Transit technologies that prove inefficient are unable to gain a foothold in the market. Or so the story goes.
Rose, Seely, and Barrett, in the ironically titled, The Best Transportation System in the World, sharply contest this view. Noting that “the important role played by direct government action in structuring industries and markets has sometimes been neglected,” they explore how federal power shaped the nation’s railroads, trucking, and aviation industries (Rose, Seely, and Barrett, p. xiii). Focusing on the twentieth century, from roughly 1920 to the late 1980s, Rose et al. systematically dissect how the government restructured the transportation system piece by piece, then attempted to manage the different sectors independently, preventing direct competition.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, a period when trucking and aviation were emerging as competitors to railroads, industry executives and public officials collaborated to develop “policy initiatives governing individual forms of transport, worked out in isolation” (Rose et al., p. 2). By maintaining a fragmented system, “American political leaders never developed an overarching transportation policy, despite occasional claims to the contrary” (Rose et al., p. 2). The effect of this arrangement lasted for decades.
At the beginning of World War II, federal regulation of transportation “embraced the bedrock assumption that transportation was a series of modes,” each distinct and independent, and rather explicitly rejected coordination across modes (Rose et al., p. 33). No legislation better reflected this mentality than the Transportation Act of 1940, which used “the weight and authority of the government of the United States” to keep rail, truck, and air transport industries separate. From the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, the United States underwent a period of major infrastructure development, while “the politics of transportation in the United States focused around the efforts of leaders in sharply defined rail, truck, and airline industries to defend and expand the boundaries created for them” (Rose et al., pp. 74-75). As the authors show, the transportation system during this period was managed, not always carefully, as a balkanized fiefdom.
Congress constructed the commercial aviation industry almost wholesale, in large part by casting it as a critical part of Cold War national defense, and playing off its “glamorous” status in the “imaginations of politicians, regulators, and ordinary Americans.” Commercial air transportation was tightly regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which approved which airlines could serve which routes and controlled the fares airlines could charge. By the late 1960s, the CAB had created an industry “afraid of the winds of competition,” and developed a reputation as “an enemy of consumers and price competition.” Simultaneously, Congress also established a set of regulatory boundaries around the nation’s surface transportation industries. Through the 1950s and 1960s, railroad and trucking executives fought over market share but consistently sidestepped directly competing with one another, or with the airlines. Though deregulation of surface transportation was proposed on several occasions, “the notion of restoring competition to truckers and railroaders enjoyed few friends in or out of Congress,” and thus up to the early 1970s, rails and trucks “operated within markets and within industries determined by federal rules and federal regulators” (Rose et al., pp. 98-99). As with the airline industry, by the early 1970s efforts by trucking and railroad executives and their allies to maintain a heavily regulated market increasingly met with critics who railed against high prices and lack of competition. As the U.S. economy experienced “fast rising prices and fast rising unemployment” in the early 1970s, Nixon, Ford, and Carter “looked to deregulation of transportation and other industries as a device that would reduce the costs of production and consumption” (Rose et al., p. 133). Airlines too found themselves included in this “regulatory reform” movement (Rose et al., pp. 95-96).
With the spectacular bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad in 1970, the struggles of the railroads was laid bare. Nixon, recognizing the significance of the Penn Central collapse to the broader health of the national economy, sought “innovative policies” to “accomplish more than a quick fix for railroad finances” (Rose et al., p. 152). Nixon made the fight to deregulate surface transportation a “regular if sometimes unpopular topic of conversation among leaders in transportation and politics.” In the wake of Nixon’s abrupt departure in 1973, Ford and then Carter carried on the “process of transforming deregulation into an increasingly plausible idea for restoring growth without inflation to the American economy” (Rose et al., p. 164-165).
While Ford only secured “a limited railroad deregulation” because the cash-strapped railroads were in need of government backed loans and grants, Carter found greater success. By careful appointments to the main administrative bodies overseeing the regulatory system, and by cultivating a “coalition of proderegulation business leaders” who pressured Congress, Carter succeeded in deregulating the airlines in 1978 and the trucking industry in 1980 (Rose et al., p. 166). In the aftermath, the cost of transportation declined, as many analysts had predicted. Competition increased, the number of mergers went up, and quite a few firms were driven out of business. Yet these changes were never really the product of a free market, despite claims otherwise. As Rose, Seely, and Barrett point out, it was “federal officials, including members of Congress, judges, administrators, and especially Presidents of the United States,” that “constituted the nation’s transportation systems and the nation’s transportation markets,” and the federal government that created both regulation and deregulation (p. 239).
Zachary Schrag’s The Great Society Subway reveals the planning, design, and construction of the Washington Metro as an exemplary case of federal transportation policy in the second half of the twentieth century. Constructed during “an era when Americans passionately embraced the automobile,” Metro came to symbolize not only a rare triumph of mass transit in the United States but also a revelation of the raw power of federal “politics and ideology” to shape debates about the appropriate form of transportation infrastructure (Schrag, p. 1). Examining the building of Metro, Schrag also manages an insightful exploration of the intellectual ferment at the heart of urban planning in the 1960s, a period when public revolt against urban renewal was reaching a crescendo, but also when the technical capacity of planners was rapidly expanding.
In chapters organized both chronologically and topically, Schrag first leads readers through a rather contentious set of debates overseen by the legendary planner Harland Bartholomew in the 1950s about the fundamental character of urban transportation, and whether “mass transit had any role still to play” in a place home to a rapidly increasing number of automobiles (p. 34). Yet by the mid-1960s, because of citizen protests and key appointments to the National Capital Transportation Agency (NCTA), the Kennedy-Johnson White House helped recenter rail in the plan for Washington’s new transit system.
Once the validity of rail transit was established, the fate of Washington’s transit system became embroiled in the 1960s in larger questions about “who would govern the city”—the residents of the District or Congress. Subsequently, “transit became the key battleground in the city’s struggle for home rule” (Schrag, p. 95). In 1967, Virginia, Maryland, and Congress tried to quell this conflict by mutually agreeing to cede control over the transit system to the new Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which would include representatives of each constituent government. With a more locally controlled authority taking over planning and building Metro, the extent of the proposed system was expanded to include more extensive suburban segments. In 1968, a revised map was adopted by WMATA. While the cost had ballooned to $2.5 billion, the system had become truly regional in scope and better reflected local conditions (Schrag, pp. 117-118).
As the battle for control of the rail system raged, WMATA was also moderating an internal fight over the central part of the user experience of Metro: the design of the stations. After two years of back and forth between architect Harry Wesse and the Federal Commission of Fine Arts, the WMATA board finally voted to accept a scheme that consisted of a simple but elegant design for the underground stations (vaulted ceilings and indirect lighting) and a basic open platform design for the above-ground stations (Schrag, p. 91).
Despite its successes, WMATA ran into conflict. From the beginning, the planning of Metro was connected to the construction of the urban segments of the Interstate Highway System through Washington. The push for high-capacity roads, ongoing since the 1950s, remained powerful into the late 1960s as “[d]istrict and state highway departments continued to press for a . . . plan, with an Inner Loop, a Three Sisters Bridge,” and north–south connections to I-70 and I-95. As Schrag notes, this situation created a standoff of sorts, as “Metro’s future was tied up with the city’s intensifying freeway fight,” and funding needed to complete construction on the new train lines remained tied up in Congress (p. 119). The center of conflict was a road-friendly Representative from Kentucky (William Natcher) who supported the plan to build freeways through the District, including the now infamous Three Sisters Bridge. After protests and lawsuits by “white professionals, many of them faithful readers of Jane Jacobs,” intervention by the Nixon administration, and a showdown between Natcher and his adversaries on the House floor, in December 1971 remaining construction funds for Metro were finally released and the controversial bridge was killed (Schrag, p. 140).
When construction on Metro broke ground in December 1969, squabbles about disruptions caused by construction emerged across the city. These intensified as the pace of construction accelerated in 1972. Part of the problem centered on the effect construction would have on the physical environment of the city. As building progressed, WMATA officials were forced to strike small bargains with various federal and local agencies over station entrance details, appease neighbors and business owners who complained about traffic disruptions, reduce the size of parking lots, and even cancel entire stations (Schrag, pp. 153-61). Ultimately, the compromises during the construction process gave Metro’s constituents a direct hand in shaping the system. Schrag argues that this “intervention was a triumphant example of democracy in action,” a step that ensured “fairness and compassion” would be built into the system even if it added to the bottom line (p. 170). Indeed, the escalating cost of Metro’s construction at times appeared to imperil the system, and “critics were given every chance to make their case against completing the system.” Yet, Schrag suggests, “the people of the region and the Congress decided that Metro merited funding as a public service, just like roads, parks, fire protection, and sewer connections” (p. 171).
Financial cost aside, Metro’s effect on the DC region has been difficult to evaluate, and “thirty years after ground breaking, it is still too early to judge” the success of Metro’s planners in “attracting dense commercial and residential development to its stations” (Schrag, p. 196). Schrag characterizes the influence of the system on the District, the suburbs, and the people who use the system. Like other cities with postwar rail systems, Washington displays the full gamut of station-area development, from “dense mixed use development in the European style,” to “stations amid parking lots and vacant lots” (Schrag, p. 221). In almost every case, the difference between a dense transit-oriented development (TOD) and a commuter station surrounded by a sea of surface parking is, as Schrag rightly notes, a result “of the determination and foresight of a long series of planners and public officials” with a shared notion of appropriate development (p. 222). Within the structures created by tracks, the trains, and the stations, it is the panoply of everyday riders who make Metro “most real,” by animating the system (Schrag, p. 243). As the system aged, Metro remapped the city in many ways, becoming a tourist destination of sorts, a mixing bowl for the region’s diverse population, and even an underground art gallery. Against the spare simplicity of the stations and the quiet train cars, Metro stands as “a triumph of urban life” (Schrag, p. 272).
Though the success of Metro in reshaping Washington’s built environment will perhaps take decades more to see through, John Stilgoe predicts that the “spatial future” of the country (Washington included) will be marked by a return to density, brought about by a rebirth of rail travel. At the outset of Train Time, Stilgoe posits that “Americans now live in what appears to be the final, sickly sweet blossoming of the automobile and airline, and the related real estate development,” a situation likely to lead to “middle-income Americans” being unable to “afford to live as they live now” (p. 8). In lieu of the vast suburban sprawl that characterizes most American cities, and the wasted landscape fragments left in its wake, the return of railroads will “transform half-forgotten jewels” and “reshape regions far from existing tracks” (Stilgoe, p. 14).
Suggesting that obscure data buried in old rail company timetables and annual reports has led to a renewed appreciation among investors of the pending return of defunct and abandoned railroad lines, Stilgoe sets forth the argument that underlies his book, and indeed all the books reviewed here: “the landscape that people created around the railroad may have been better than the sprawl the automobile engenders” (p. 41). From there, he runs through an explanation of how Lynchburg, Virginia, once served as a railroad hub, and might someday anchor “an entire recreational resort economy” within close distance of Washington, D.C. He follows with a recounting of the decline of passenger rail innovation in the postwar period, an ode to the vanished vacation railroad lines of the early and mid-twentieth century, and a discussion of the heights of luxury train travel (Stilgoe, p. 63).
Shifting focus to consider freight and commercial rail, Stilgoe explains the tangled history of mail, parcel service, and rail and imagines if such a system existed today, in which “a matrix of mail and express trains offers an alternative to a retail market dominated by Wal-Mart, shopping malls, high-end urban stores, and Internet sites” (p. 152). In describing the quickening pace of moving goods across the continent, Stilgoe offers prognosis after prognosis of a happy future for trains. Whether the freight be double-stacked containers filled with consumer goods from Asia, hoppers filled with wheat from Kansas, or open cars laden with Powder Basin coal, railroads form part of an efficient but mostly unseen system of freight movement. This system, increasingly “high-tech and prosperous,” has had an “astounding impact” on “global trade, reshaping investment and the North American landscape” in the process (Stilgoe, p. 201). In Stilgoe’s view, this capacity underscores the power of railroads to reshape the built environment, especially the central business districts of major American cities. As the cost of moving goods by truck into the urban core increases, even the “ring zones separating downtown from the suburbs” may again become hot commodities for investors looking to ride the next real estate boom (Stilgoe, pp. 223-24).
Arguing that the much-heralded light rail systems of recent vintage “operate in a conceptual limbo” because they tend to be placed in existing rail rights of way, Stilgoe bemoans the fact that they “eliminate the potential of such corridors to carry long-distance trains again” (p. 247). With less capacity to move large numbers of commuters, and with tracks insufficient to be shared with heavier freight trains, light rail systems ultimately “represent a failure of regionwide scenario analysis” and “only exacerbate the crisis facing metropolitan regions desperately in need of passenger trains” (Stilgoe, pp. 251-52).
Train Time ends with the prediction that “highway congestion will worsen as the national population increases almost wholly in coastal strips seventy five miles wide and in perhaps fifteen inland . . . regions,” and this future seems certain to entail a rebirth of rail travel (Stilgoe, p. 259). Indeed, Stilgoe already sees evidence of this resurgence in the built environment, at MIT where new university buildings that span rail lines “are constructed so that the single track can be widened immediately to double track,” and “everywhere along the railroads” across the country for those who choose to look (p. 262).
By focusing on the design of transit vehicles in My Kind of Transit, Darrin Nordahl offers a breezy overview of the qualities that make transit special. As he points out, “much attention has been given to the environmental benefits, economics, and the quality of the destinations served by public transit . . . little, if any, attention is given to the journey, the experience offered within the transit car” (p. 4). Henceforth, “if transit is to become an attractive alternative to the automobile, the ride itself must offer an experience to passengers that they cannot get within the solitude of their cars” (p. 6). To support his point, Nordahl spends the remaining eight chapters highlighting transit systems in the United States that he believes provide those kinds of unique experiences.
Introducing his argument by describing the myriad transit options available to the Disneyland visitor, Nordahl pinpoints the characteristics of the theme park’s various transit systems that make it so appealing to so many people: “the park’s transit systems were engineered not for the sole purpose of transporting people form one location to the next but for doing so in a way that provides a joyful experience for the passenger” (p. 28). Therein he suggests a key point for transit design: the journey should be considered part of the destination.
Seeking emotionally fulfilling transit experiences, the book goes on to explore cable cars in San Francisco, “arguably, the epitome of enjoyable urban transportation,” and the St. Charles streetcar that still plies the Garden District in New Orleans, a leisurely line that “matches the ease with which citizens move about the city” (Nordahl, p. 45). Nordahl next compares the successful and popular Seattle monorail with the busy but uninspiring Las Vegas monorail, noting that though “similar in form and function, the two systems yield very different passenger experiences” (p. 60). It is not hard to guess which one he prefers.
Describing electric bus shuttles in Santa Barbara, Phoenix, and Chattanooga, Nordahl concludes that the degree to which the shuttles are “climate-responsive to their . . . respective environments” has much to do with their success or failure. Taking on New York taxis, Nordahl reflects on the brightening effect of the yellow color of the cabs, their ability to eliminate the need for private cars, and their role as social spaces in the lives of the people who use them. In spite of the fact that 90 percent of the city’s taxi fleet are Ford Crown Victorias, cars “woefully miscast in the taxicab role,” nevertheless the “taxicabs offer unique experiences . . . that cannot be found in other transit systems in the country” (Nordahl, p. 90, 96). Funiculars in Pittsburgh, the Roosevelt Island tram, and elevated trains in Chicago round out the remainder of the book. Describing both the good and the bad of each, Nordahl highlights how each of these modes was developed to respond to a highly specific transportation problem. Extremely steep hills in the case of Pittsburgh, an island in the East River that had no subway service in the case of the Roosevelt Gondolas, and low cost in the case of Chicago’s “El.”
In conclusion, Nordahl offers a series of “essential design considerations for those dimensions of public transportation that can enrich our passenger experience” (p. 125). His suggestions include broad issues like routes and scale (of the vehicle) as well as more specific issues like the need for short headway (the time interval between transit vehicles) and transparent windows that can be opened to the elements. Most importantly, he suggests that transit’s success depends on “provid[ing] a rewarding passenger experience” in order to be a viable alternative to the car. Nordahl ends with the idea that if we learn to treat transit systems and vehicles with a more thoughtful design scheme, then transit has the opportunity to become one of the highly valued “third places” that “provide socially enriching and restorative experiences that the first and second places of work and home cannot” (pp. 153-54). Transit, if properly designed, could again become an essential part of the glue that holds society together.
Together, these books contribute to a larger argument that the American love affair with private automobiles, roads, and airplanes has robbed the country of an important social and political space. While popular perception often attributes the dominance of the auto to the power of consumer preference, these authors reveal how politicians, planners, and corporate executives have constructed those preferences. The intense politics surrounding transportation infrastructure, much of it decided at the federal level, shaped local transit options in ways typically hidden from public view. Indeed, transit systems have often taken their form based more on obscure political bargains and policy initiatives than efficiency or cost effectiveness or competition. But because those decisions involved little fanfare, were incredibly boring, and made for rather unappealing news headlines, they mostly went unnoticed, despite their importance. As Richard White has noted, the boredom of planning has meant that “power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep.” 1 In the cases described here, decision makers didn’t need to hide. No one was paying attention.
Perhaps the broader significance of these books lies in their exploration of one of the key channels through which the American state has exerted its power in the twentieth century. 2 As each author points out, movement is fundamental to a functioning society. Providing infrastructure to support movement requires collective and coordinated action. Decisions about the kind of infrastructure that should be built dictate the forms that movement takes, and can privilege one mode of travel over another and one form of urbanization over another. As these books make clear, the implications of transportation mode choice are legion, and influence everything from air and water quality, to economic growth, to social life. The decisions about transportation infrastructure are especially important to those who stand to benefit. The study of North American transportation systems deserves additional attention. The books reviewed here add much to this growing literature.