Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis
Book Review by: Clifton Hood
For Citation: Business History Review 83 (Autumn 2009)
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 audience 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 high tide of mass transit, from the 1880s through 1929; another to the Great Depression and the New Deal; one to World War II and its aftermath; another to the interstate era of the 1950s through the 1970s; and two more to the consequences of rising oil prices for the American system of motorization and for U.S. automakers. A quarter of the book examines events that have occurred since the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, an emphasis that has a special appeal in the light of last year’s oil shock.
Using a series of statistical measures to trace the motorization of the United States over time and to compare it to that of other industrial countries, Jones defines the threshold of national “mass motorization” to be the attainment of 400 vehicles per 1,000 population. Although, by this yardstick, twenty-three advanced nations had achieved mass motorization by 2000, Jones calls the United States a “‘peer group of one’ in terms of the intensity of its automobile and truck ownership and use” (p. 3). The duration and present strength of U.S. motorization, Jones tells us, is unique: the United States had achieved a significant leadership in motorization as early as 1925, and today it has a level of motor-vehicle ownership that is far higher than that of any other G-7 nation. Put another way, while the United States crossed the threshold of mass motorization in 1958, Canada did not pass it until 1971 (a lag of thirteen years), France and Germany until 1980 (a lag of twenty-two years), Italy until 1984 (twenty-six years), and the United Kingdom and Japan until 1987 (twenty-nine years). In 2000, there were 784 motor vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in the United States, compared to 676 per thousand in the second most auto-dependent of the G-7 nations, Canada.
How did this state of affairs come about? According to Jones, the best explanation is that World Wars I and II suppressed motorization in Europe, even as they stimulated the U.S. economy, producing a surge in per-capita income that facilitated home and automobile ownership and spurred the rise of the U.S. automobile industry. Jones adds that the United States, then an oil-producing and exporting nation, encouraged the ascension of motor vehicles through its public policies, while western European countries, all oil importers, were less hospitable. (As Jones sees it, a major source of our current predicament is that the United States has continued to behave like the oil-surplus nation it was through the 1960s, rather than the oil-importing nation that it subsequently became.) According to Jones, the most critical policy decisions were made during the 1930s, when the New Deal authorized the use of federal funds for state highway construction within cities, and when the first plans for an interregional highway network (which would evolve into the interstate system) were made. Although some European nations, like Germany with its Autobahn, also designed national highway systems in the 1930s, the fundamental difference was that the United States alone promoted the construction of urban highways, which would alter metropolitan settlement patterns and strengthen motorization.
Jones has written about freeways in California and has complete control of the highway side of this story. His command of mass transit, however, is less sure. Missing from his bibliography are references to the important scholarship of historians such as Glen E. Holt, George Rogers Taylor, Paul F. Barrett, and Zachary M. Schrag. He also discusses transportation in New York City without citing the work of Jameson W. Doig, Robert Caro, Joel Schwarz, Charles W. Cheape, and others. Had he incorporated Barrett’s argument that the Americans defined mass transit as a business that should be controlled and the private automobile as a public good that should be accommodated, for instance, he might have added depth and complexity to his own account. As it is, his analysis of mass transit’s decline is thin and one dimensional.
That said, I found Jones’s skepticism about mass transit’s capacity to solve our current economic and environmental mess refreshing and persuasive. Recent mass-transit projects have not only had limited success in remedying traffic congestion and pollution, but metropolitan land-use patterns also all but ensure continued automobile dependence. Yet Jones argues that the nub of the problem is not motorization itself, but rather the internal combustion engine and its externalities. He believes that a sustainable form of automobility that will lead us out of our “American conundrum” can be achieved through the adoption of hydrogen-cell vehicles and a fifty-cents-per-gallon gasoline surtax. Let’s hope he’s right.