Rapid Transit: Automobility and Settlement in Urban America

Down the Asphalt Path is an important contribution to the social history of urban technology. Exploring the relationship between improved street pavements and faster transit vehicles, it also examines their impact on urban life and how cultural assumptions shaped their design and implementation. McShane’s thesis, based largely on a study of New York, where the car culture first emerged, is that the triumph of the automobile had less to do with the refinement of the internal combustion engine than with the transformation of urban culture.

Making excellent use of an array of sources bearing on law, public health, popular and material culture, city planning and municipal government, McShane’s argument unfolds in three parts. In his first chapters he retells the familiar story of improvements in urban transit and the suburbanization this made possible, adding a focus on street pavements that reveals the disruptive impact of rapid transit on the city. In a culture that viewed streets as sources of light and air and as public space for sociability, recreation, petty commerce, and politics, in short as an integral part of local settlements, the view of the street as a traffic artery met considerable resistance. Although inner-city residents managed to prevent the use of steam railways on their streets, between 1850 and 1870 the horse-drawn street railway began to produce profits for operators and realtors and suburban lifestyles for wealthy commuters, winning ardent and powerful supporters for improved transit.

After 1870 the growth of the industrial city popularized the desire for a suburban haven from its turmoil and generated the demand for cheap rapid transit. So did the new concern with public health and the environmental explanation of disease. The miasmic vapors of decaying organic material, public health officials warned, concentrated in dense urban neighborhoods; detached single-family dwellings in open, suburban spaces promised the best protection. Distrust of municipal government prevented aggressive land-use and housing policies, but cities encouraged suburbanization through liberal franchises to private street railways.

In the 1890s faster transit speeds became a near obsession. Elevated trains and cable traction appeared but enormous fixed costs limited their applicability. The electric trolley provided the first widespread, commercially and culturally viable form of rapid transit. At speeds of twelve miles per hour the trolleys opened extensive suburban tracts, fueling their adoption nationwide and (along with bicycles) familiarizing urbanites with fast vehicles in their streets. A fascination with speed also contributed to the building of limited-access speedways for carriages, usually located in large, outlying public parks designed to anchor fashionable suburban neighborhoods. A desire for faster transit spurred the search for “a cheap mechanical substitute for the horse.” The intensification of urban commerce had increased the demand for horses to make local deliveries, adding cross-town delivery costs nearly as high as interstate costs. Manhattan alone had 130,000 horses in 1900, a source of power that was not only slow and unwieldy but prone to disease and a major polluter. The trolley, the speedway, and the truck suggested that public support for mobility-enhancing technologies could improve the quality of urban life.

The revolution in street pavements, central to improved transit, awaited the reorganization of municipal government. At mid-century decentralized municipal governments financed street paving through assessments of abutters, who favored wide sidewalks, narrow roadways and the cheapest pavements most discouraging to heavy traffic. The post-Civil War political machines provided a measure of centralization and launched ambitious public works in the name of mobility, but inefficiency and corruption discredited their programs. Fiscally conservative structural reformers, while creating the independent boards that gave municipal engineers a base of power, limited spending and reinforced the tax-paying abutters’ control over pavements. Ironically it was social reformers, self-styled champions of the inner-city poor, who transformed the traditional street into the traffic artery. Promoting cheap, rapid transit as a panacea for the poor, empowering professional engineers, and financing paving costs...