The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (review)

Over roughly a thirty-year period starting in the late 1960s, the Washington Metro expanded from nothing to about 105 miles of route at a cost of more than $7 billion. Almost 660,000 people a day now use its 86 monumental stations (each actually the size of the Washington Monument laid on its side), many buried far below the surface. In this superbly written book, Zachary Schrag, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University, explains how this achievement came about and what its impact is.

In doing so, Schrag assumes the role not of one blind man describing the elephant (in this case, the Metro), but of eleven. The introduction and each of the ten subsequent chapters offer a fresh perspective. Schrag's command of disciplines needed to address each perspective is impressive, ranging from urban history to academic transportation policy, from architecture to popu-lar culture, from urban planning to national and local politics, and from rail-transit technology to bus-transit politics, among others. His observations arise from a firm foundation of sources, including a broad secondary literature, technical reports, and numerous interviews with participants in the history of the Washington Metro.

Observing the Metro with affection and the city it serves with empathy, Schrag first attacks economists and planners who dismiss rail-transit investments as a waste of public resources in the automobile-based culture of the United States. "I consider fun to be a legitimate goal of public policy," he proclaims. "If it is all right for an individual to spend his money on a snazzy sports car when a humble hatchback would get him to work just as well, why is it wrong for a region or nation of free people to buy collectively a more glamorous transit system . . .?" (pp. 286–87). He next presents a history of the region, emphasizing its governance, layout, and concern for monumentality, before turning to more contemporary transportation planning. Here he treats the complementary origin of a regional metropolitan-freeway network, including proposed routes crisscrossing the central city, and a proposed less-comprehensive regional rapid-transit system. He then recounts the origin and course of anti-freeway revolts by the local population, interwoven with a change of governance from congressional control to local control: he views the existing Metro system and the cancellation of most of the freeway system within the beltway as emerging from that process. There are beautifully written chapters on the evolution of the design of the system's characteristic stations, regional politics, the anti-freeway fight, the people promoting and building the system, financing, the impact of the system on development in both the central area and the suburbs, and the public face of the system.

In addressing land-use impacts and ridership, Schrag notes that the system has not achieved the level of usage originally forecast, nor has it caused development to occur around stations unless there is large-scale public intervention. Even then, results have been mixed, particularly in the old downtown area. Nonetheless, by blocking construction of the freeway system inside the beltway, the District of Columbia has seen a resurgence of human-scale residential investment, and the Metro has provided a means not only for suburbanites to get into the District, but for District residents to avoid crushing auto congestion. Schrag concludes that every penny invested in the system has been worth it, and he underscores his conclusion with an evocative description of the public face of the system, those who use it, and what they experience.

The major question that the author does not address adequately is whether the Metro has caused the region as a whole (outside of the District) to develop any differently than U.S. metropolitan areas where such an investment has not been made. Has the Metro slowed the rate of decentralization? Has it reduced single-auto modal split? I suspect that the answer is "no" in both...