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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 446-447



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Metropolitan Railways: Rapid Transit in America. By William D. Middleton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. viii+275. $59.95.

William Middleton, once a civil engineer for the U.S. Navy and later director of facilities for the University of Virginia, is a preeminent historian of electric railways. His writing—which includes The Interurban Era (1961), The Time of the Trolley (1967), and When the Steam Railroads Electrified (1974)—is an example of a leading genre of transportation history, the chronicle. Typically the product of enthusiasts who have a lifelong fascination with railways, chronicles are descriptive rather than analytical, stress the presentation of factual details over argumentation and conceptualization, and, at their best, exhibit great knowledge of their subject matter.

Metropolitan Railways surveys the development of rapid transit and light rail in North America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. There is a chapter on how urban growth and traffic congestion led to experiments with new rapid transit technologies in New York City in the mid- and late-nineteenth century; one on the construction of elevated systems in New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century; one on the early development of the subways in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; another on post-World War II heavy rail projects in Toronto, Cleveland, and Chicago; another on the technological innovation in the Montreal metro, San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit Rapid Transit District (BART), and the Washington Metro in the 1960s and 1970s; another on the expansion of light rail after the 1960s; another on rolling stock; and another on urban rail's prospects. There are two appendixes, one summarizing the history of rail technology, including structures, construction techniques, and power supply, the other providing excellent maps of current North American urban rail systems. The text is interwoven with photographs and prints.

Middleton concentrates on the construction of new transit systems and the extension of existing networks, the innovation of new technologies, and [End Page 446] the advent of new administrative practices. I had not known that Chicago pioneered joint rapid transit-expressway development when a ground-level segment of a subway was built on a right-of-way in a highway median in the 1950s, or that Cleveland became the first U.S. city with a rapid transit link to its airport, in 1968. This approach can be enlightening, but Middleton's preoccupation with "firsts" and with improvements skews the historical record by presenting rapid transit in an overly favorable light. For instance, he plays down the collapse of the transit industry in the 1920s and 1930s, overlooking the business incompetence and political corruption that contributed to its failures as much as postwar inflation and misguided public policies did.

Middleton's conclusions about transit's recent renaissance are also questionable. He rightly observes that "[t]he last decades of the twentieth century were good ones for North America's metropolitan railways" (p. 205), but his prediction that railways promise to be "even more a part of North American urban life in the twenty-first century than they had been in its nineteenth or twentieth" (p. 214) is optimistic, because he does not come to terms with the continued supremacy of the automobile, the proliferation of low-density spatial patterns, widespread opposition to land-use controls, and race. For instance, Middleton discusses a light-rail system that has recently opened in downtown Memphis, but what is most important there is that poverty, racial tensions, and real estate developers have emptied its central business district while pushing the edge of suburbanization twenty-five miles to the east, making light rail irrelevant for most people. Similarly, while the rail construction programs and land-use controls that have been implemented in Toronto and in Portland, Oregon, are admirable, Middleton is unconvincing in his treatment of these two cities as the leading edge of North American urban practices rather than exceptions to the type of low-density construction that prevails in Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, and elsewhere.

Still, despite his excesses...

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