Conspiracy or Consumer Choice?

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 the 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...