Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective (review)

The impact of streetcars on urban form is thought to be well understood, at least in the United States. After 1888 the low cost and relatively high speed of streetcar technology precipitated a middle-class migration from center cities to single-family homes in surrounding countryside. The newly suburbanized middle classes remained tethered by streetcar lines to the central areas they left behind, which quickly transformed into shopping, office, and entertainment districts. Streetcars were too expensive for the working classes, however, who continued to live in dense tenements within walking distance of factories. Popularized by Sam Bass Warner's histories of street railway development in Boston and Philadelphia, this view remains central to the curriculum of urban transit evolution in the United States.

Suburbanizing the Masses takes issue with this interpretation, inferring more complicated interactions between transit technology and urban form. It brings together thirteen essays deriving from a conference at the National Railway Museum in York in 1997, with participants from Germany, Sweden, Poland, England, Japan, and the United States. Editors Colin Divall and Winstan Bond have organized the essays into three sections, examining the impact of rail transit investments on urban form, the ways in which the mores of transportation planners influence their recommendations, and the impact of cultural traditions on the nature and performance of urban transport investments, particularly terminals.

Divall and Barbara Schmucki begin with an excellent interpretive essay. Part 1 then reexamines the impact of transit investment on cities. Both Paolo Capuzzo and Dieter Schott argue that social reformers in Germany, Austria, and other parts of Europe hoped that tramway investments would expand the supply of housing for the working classes by opening surrounding areas for development. They were largely frustrated. Although Schott demonstrates that steam tramways did result in the growth of nearby villages, overall this growth was not large. Capuzzo argues that many other variables acted on the supply of housing, notably socially conservative forces that acted to keep both tram fares and land rents high. It was not until World War I broke the backs of such reactionary elements that large numbers of workers began using trams. Capuzzo also points out that significant transit investments, such as the Paris métro, were intended to speed up movement within the congested inner area and not to open new land. Coeditor Bond argues that slow speeds largely circumscribed the ability of tram investments to disperse the population, even in the United States, while Jacek Wesolowski documents the expansion of urban railways and interurban trams in Poland during the past hundred years but notes that none of these lines induced a restructuring of urban form. That restructuring now is occurring around automobile rather than railway technology.

Essays in Part 2 generally cover more recent periods as they examine how transit planners have attempted to influence travel behavior. Schmucki looks at planning goals in post–World War II East and West Germany. She finds remarkable convergence in the male-dominated culture on both sides, characterized by infatuation with automobiles even immediately after the war, when official policy was explicitly counter to the embrace of roadways in the United States. The auto mentality flowered in the planning community when investments in tram modernization failed to stop the pace of motorization on both sides of the iron curtain. Only in recent years has popular revulsion against the noise, hazards, and developmental consequences of the mass movement of autos forced planners to consider needs of other transport users.

Tomas Eckman considers how political ideology informed the direction of urban transport policy in Sweden. He argues that the decision in 1941 to build a regional subway system into greenfields—where new towns would be constructed around stations—was a collectivist vision for a better future. This vision was later abandoned by those who would invest in extensive road systems based on consumer choice without considering the environmental...