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Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis. By David W. Jones. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xiii + 268 pp. Tables, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-253-35152-4.
Reviewed by Clifton Hood
Why did the United States become the most heavily motorized nation in the world? Why have its mass-transit systems been unable to adapt to the age of mass motorization? These are the questions that David W. Jones asks in this history of the economic and public policy development of American urban and suburban transportation since the late nineteenth century.
Jones is not a professional historian- his PhD degree is in communications- and he is writing for an authence of policymakers and transportation specialists, rather than for academics. In some ways, that orientation is an advantage. Most of the professional historians who have written about urban transportation have been "splitters" who have divided the subject into its separate mass-transit and automobile components, have examined discrete parts of this long time period, or have concentrated on a particular city or region. Jones, by contrast, is a "lumper." Relying almost entirely on the secondary literature, which is extensive, he has produced a synthesis that looks at the history of American mass motorization in the context of the other advanced industrial nations. That international perspective, in particular, leads to some valuable insights.
In eleven chapters, Jones surveys the history of American urban transportation from the 1880s to the present. His periodization is conventional: he devotes a chapter to the...