In this sweeping history of urban transportation modernization and postmodernization in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 268, $39.95), David Jones debunks popular explanations for the decline of mass transit and the rise of mass motorization. In their place he resurrects an earlier explanation based on rising income and personal choice. Unlike other proponents of the personal choice explanation, however, Jones is alarmed about its consequences, including foreign oil dependence, global warming, and ever-worsening congestion. One of his more interesting chapters accounts for the collapse of the domestic automobile industry despite the public’s overwhelming endorsement of automobility. He concludes with prescriptions for dealing with negative consequences of mass mobility that are consistent with the public’s enthusiasm for it.

There are two schools of thought on the decline of mass transit and the rise of mass motorization in the United States. The first developed in the 1960s, when economic historian John Meyer, economist John Kain, and several followers explained these phenomena in terms of rising personal incomes. More income provided middle-class Americans more choices for travel and places to live, and middle-class Americans overwhelmingly chose to buy cars and live in large, single-family homes in the suburbs. Such choices greatly stimulated traffic growth, to which federal and state governments responded into the 1970s by building highways thought to have sufficient capacity to alleviate congestion.

The second school coalesced in the early 1970s, when Bradford Snell, counsel to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, argued a counterthesis that some scholars embraced and that was popularized by a Hollywood movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and a public television documentary, Taken for a Ride. Snell and his followers blamed the demise of mass transit and the subsequent mass motorization of American society on corporate and government manipulation of transportation supply in contravention of middle-class American demands. They told how General Motors and other auto interests had set up holding companies that bought up viable street-railway systems throughout the nation and replaced them with GM diesel buses whose service was so inferior to that of streetcars that Americans turned to private automobiles and stopped using mass transit. Federal and state highway policy sought to enhance demand for autos with a massive interstate highway system and urban freeways that ultimately lured Americans and their jobs out of the cities and to the distant suburbs where mass-transit service could not possibly be provided. According to this view, one has only to look to Canada and to western Europe to see where different government policies toward highways and mass transit have resulted in different and more socially benign cities and travel behavior.

Jones’s historical narrative speaks to the two theses, though with insufficient credit to their originators, as it weaves together relationships among various statistics from the United States, Canada, and several European countries over the span of roughly thirteen decades. These statistics include real per-capita income, transit investments, transit ridership, transit profitability, automobile ownership, annual vehicle miles, and auto industry output and profitability, among others. Informed by a limited number of interviews with government transportation specialists, Jones compares trends indicated by these statistics. He also sets the trends against transportation policies of the various countries while commenting on the plausibility of the two explanations.

Numerous points that generally refute the Snell thesis and affirm the Meyer thesis emerge from the narrative. For example, the streetcar industry went into the red during World War I, two decades before automotive interests began purchasing operating companies. When automotive interests did show interest in streetcars, there were no competing interests against which they had to bid, because streetcars had become hopelessly unprofitable. Even during the prosperous 1920s streetcar patronage fell in all but the largest U.S. cities as auto ownership soared. At the same time, beginning with adoption of the income tax and the simultaneous exemption of interest on home mortgages in 1913, auto-oriented suburbs grew at an astounding rate. Jones makes a convincing argument that consumer choice was the underlying determinant of these patterns, three decades before highway policy precipitated metropolitan regions with networks of freeways. Jones also shows that auto adoption at particular levels of per-capita income occurred just as fast and in some cases faster in Canada and various European countries than in the United States, albeit usually two to three decades later.

Jones does see transportation policy influencing behavior on the margin, however. Per-capita income in Canada and several European countries is close to and may reach that in the United States, but Jones reasons that auto ownership and usage in these countries will remain somewhat lower. What will make the difference is governmental policies that restrain construction of urban freeways while maintaining or expanding high-quality rail-based transit systems. Jones sees a possibility for some U.S. metropolitan areas achieving similar results from investments in light rail and a commitment to operating-cost control.

While Jones’s narrative is generally convincing, there are several factual errors and important omissions. The freeway revolt is slighted, for example. The devastating impact that urban freeways had on neighborhoods and parks they traversed sparked revolts in San Francisco, Boston, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon, and other cities. It altered consciousness everywhere, ultimately changing U.S. policy toward regional planning, transit investment, and the acquisition of right-of-way for urban roads. In another example, Jones’s argument that the abandonment of streetcar systems stemmed from lack of investment in such systems during the 1920s and 1930s also is missing some important detail. The industry indeed was in financial distress during those decades, but even so, it made substantial investments in infrastructure. It also made major investments in rolling stock, including the purchase of 5,000 radically modern PCC streetcars, which continued in some cities into the early 1950s. That such investments were made and then almost immediately abandoned suggests that Jones’s explanation for the end of street railways needs some finessing.

There are other problems as well. In some parts of the text, Jones conflates attitudes or events from one time period with those in another. He states that the Southern Pacific Company, for example, shifted investments in the Pacific Electric Railway from passenger to freight shortly after purchasing that company in 1910. Actually, this did not happen until the 1950s. Jones also claims (correctly) that Snell got his facts wrong in his case study of the alleged takeover of the Pacific Electric by a General Motors–backed holding company. But in attempting to set the record straight Jones further muddies the water. He conflates the actual takeover that happened in 1953 after the company had already converted most of its passenger-rail operations to buses with a minor takeover of some local Pacific Electric lines in California cities like Pasadena and Long Beach that happened in 1940.

Despite these problems with his narrative, I believe that Jones describes the big picture correctly and points his policy recommendations in the right direction. He sees a future where motor vehicles will continue to satisfy the mobility needs of the vast majority of the urban population. Motoring will be more costly, however, and at the same time more benign. Motorists will encounter hefty road pricing as they drive electric cars on new urban-friendly arterial roads not unlike the parkways of the 1920s. Mass transit still will exist for a small minority of travel demands, much as in Europe today. In the median of parkways there will be regional light-rail lines whose stations will be the center of dense agglomerations of mixed-use development. The various parts of the regional bus and rail transit network will be contracted out in order to control costs.

Overall, I recommend Mass Motorization and Mass Transit for classes on transportation history and transportation policy. It offers a solid foundation for debating alternative theses that seek to account for technological change.

Dr. Thompson is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University, where he teaches courses on transporation planning.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

Filed under: Vol. 50 No. 3 (July 2009)