Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Mass Motorization and Mass Transit
Subtitle: An American History and Policy Analysis
Author: David W. Jones
Narrator: Emil Nicholas Gallina
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-01-15
Publisher: University Press Audiobooks
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: History, American
Publisher's Summary:
Mass Motorization and Mass Transit examines how the United States became the world's most thoroughly motorized nation and why mass transit has been more displaced in the United States than in any other advanced industrial nation. The book's historical and international perspective provides a uniquely effective framework for understanding both the intensity of US motorization and the difficulties the country will face in moderating its demands on the world's oil supply and reducing the CO2 emissions generated by motor vehicles. No other book offers as comprehensive a history of mass transit, mass motorization, highway development, and suburbanization or provides as penetrating an analysis of the historical differences between motorization in the United States and that of other advanced industrial nations.
The book is published by Indiana University Press.
Members Reviews:
Decent, but with errors
Given his academic credentials, I suppose that I can say that he knows what he's talking about. He does cite much of what he writes. However, he didn't seem to dot his i's and cross his t's before publishing the book. I'm just finishing the first chapter and have already noted several errors, including:
1) Calling the United States a Commonwealth nation
2) His written descriptions of trends do not always match the corresponding tables.
3) In one table, he listed the same country twice, but with two different data values for the same year.
I probably would have purchased a different book if I were doing this over again.
The comprhensive analysis I'd been looking for
This book was something that I had been seeking for quite some time. In all the discussions of urban transportation and why our cities and suburbs have the structures they do, I had never found an analysis that, for me, provided a convincing and comprehensive explanation for why things are as they are now. This book did that. It goes back to the rise (and subsequent decline) of mass transit in the form of streetcars, subways, and then buses in major metropolitan areas, the reasons why the US became the first motorized nation in the world and continues to be the most motorized nation, the unexpected impacts of both radial and circumferential parkways and freeways on the distribution of homes and jobs, and a myriad of related subjects.
It also tries to address where we go from here. The choices are not easy. Mass transit after 40+ years of public intervention is of only limited help. We have created a built environment that has serious environmental and sustainability problems with not many choices to escape from the cul de sac we find ourselves approaching.
All in all, a book I've been wanting to find and a very satisfying, if disturbing, study. I will note that there were a few text and table errors that better proofreading might have eliminated, but they didn't really distract from the thrust of the arguments presented.