Mobilitat fur alle: Geschichte des offentlichen Personennahverkehrs in der Stadt zwischen technischem Fortschritt und sozialer Pflicht (review)

The essays in this volume grew out of a conference on local public transit held in Munich in December 1994. In Germany, professional historians have left the study of local transit to company and buff historians. These essays are meant to turn attention to the municipal revolution in local transit beginning in 1880 and its relative decline after 1945 associated with the automobile. The study of these developments should join, the editors assert, social, economic, and political history with the history of technology and approaches involving supply and demand, transportation culture, and urban planning. The editors provide a chronological framework based mainly on the German experience. Initial horsecar domination (1860–1890) was followed by electric streetcars (1890–1920). The subsequent development of mass transportation involved competition among streetcars, subways, and automobiles (1920–1950). Then buses increased in significance (1950–1970) and later competed with subways and light rail systems (1960–1980). Finally, streetcars enjoyed a renaissance after 1980. The editors discuss implementation, organization, and passenger acceptance in each of the phases.

The editors have placed the articles into several categories. In a section concerning theoretical and methodological issues, Dietmar Klenke connects local transit in the automobile age with issues in social and economic history, while Stefan Fisch discusses local traffic in terms of city planning. Barbara Schmucki compares Munich and Dresden from 1945 to 1990. A second section provides case studies. Nikolaus Niederich focuses on Stuttgart (1868–1918), Uwe Grandke on Münster (1918–1939), and Stefan Bratzel on Los Angeles (1870s to 1990s). In the case of divided Berlin from 1945 to 1990, Burghard Ciesla shows the interaction of political and transportation systems, as does Elfi Bendikat in comparing Berlin and Paris from 1890 to 1914. The third section contains two essays investigating connections between local and long-distance transportation. Gert Zang shows that attempts to combine steam shipping on Lake Constance with railroads hindered the development of railroads through Constance. Hans-Liudger Dienel compares the expansion of leisure transport in east and west Germany from 1949 to 1990.

In noting the potential benefit of drawing on the sociological analysis of large technological systems, the editors identify an important aspect of the approach followed in this volume. One approach to large systems involves investigating how actors resolved heterogeneous problems as they built systems. However, these local-transit historians display little interest in decision making. Instead, they follow another approach to large systems: they establish trends, patterns, or structures and evaluate their interactions. For example, we find that Dresden and East Berlin were slower in following the same path as Munich and West Berlin. Structures produced mistakes. Titling his study “The Transit-Political Case of Failure in Los Angeles: A Pathogenesis of Municipal Mobility,” Bratzel demonstrates that early public transit helped to decentralize Los Angeles before the automobile continued the process. Bendikat argues that the Prussian light-railway law of 1892 enabled the Prussian state to prevent Berlin’s municipal government from becoming very active in local transit. By contrast, the parliamentary government in France helped Paris’s municipal government develop the metro after 1895. While we might like to know more about decision making—who promoted that Prussian law and why?—these authors present useful studies of structures and trends.