Dunn on Jones, _Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (December 2008)

David W. Jones, _Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History 
and Policy Analysis_. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. 
xiii + 269 pp. $40 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-253-35152-4.

Reviewed for EH.NET by James A. Dunn, Jr., Department of Political 
Science, Rutgers University – Camden.


David Jones, a historian who served as research manager at the 
University of California’s Institute for Transportation Studies, 
critically examines the key policy junctures in the intertwined paths of 
the mass transit sector and the automobile/highway system in America. He 
draws on a wealth of historical data, market trends, private decisions 
and public policies that shaped urban mobility from the 1880s to the 
2000s. He highlights America’s “exceptionalism” with instructive 
comparisons to other nations’ experience.

American has been “uniquely proficient in the commercialization of new 
transportation technologies.” The U.S. led the world into the electric 
transit era. In 1890, New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia each 
had two to three times more per capita transit trips than London. Then 
speculative overinvestment damaged the industry’s credit. When this 
combined with souring relations with local governments and labor union 
troubles, the industry’s financial position became one of steady capital 
disinvestment -- even before the First World War. Peacetime transit 
ridership peaked in 1926, as prosperity and motorization took off. Again 
the U.S. led the world, this time into the automotive era. In 1925 the 
U.S. motorization rate was 172 motor vehicles per 1,000 population. 
Britain and France had only 20 and 18 motor vehicles per 1,000 people, 
respectively. Despite the Depression and the total cessation of 
automobile production during World War II, the American motorization 
rate doubled by 1950.

The transit industry, despite heavy ridership during the Second World 
War, could not attract new capital or hold onto its riders after 1945. 
As he did in his excellent 1985 book, _Urban Transit Policy: An Economic 
and Political History_, Jones here points out that the transit 
industry’s labor-management rigidities, organizational weaknesses and 
the unsuitability of its radial networks to post industrial, 
decentralized metropolitan regions were holdovers from its glory years 
of 1890-1910, when it had a virtual monopoly on motorized mobility. He 
correctly has no time for conspiracy theories about auto, oil and tire 
interests forcing the abandonment of streetcars. He even argues that the 
1956 Interstate Highway Bill can not be blamed for transit’s problems in 
the 1950s and 1960s. Motorization and suburbanization would have 
proceeded almost as fast without the Interstate, as states would have 
upgraded four lane highways and authorized toll roads.

When the Congress decided to rescue transit in the 1960s, it paid too 
much attention to big city mayors, downtown businesses, and commuter 
railroads. It focused federal subsidies too narrowly on expensive new 
rail systems. In hindsight, Jones argues, it would have been better to 
have dangled federal subsidies to entice transit unions and local bus 
operators to abolish outdated labor contracts and adopt new work rules 
to permit part time labor and contracting out of some service to owner 
operators of taxi-vans. This is what Las Vegas and its union finally did 
in 1993. Since then Las Vegas’ transit trips have grown from 15 million 
to 50 million and transit’s share of commute trips has risen by 128 
percent. Nationwide, however, the hundreds of billions in public 
investment in the transit sector over the last four decades have 
stabilized ridership per capita, but at a level very close to its 
historic low. Thus transit can play only a limited role in reducing the 
externalities of our mass motorization, particularly the balance of 
payments burden of imported oil, growing CO2 emissions, and the cost of 
military intervention in the Middle East.

Jones’ final five chapters focus on the problem of making our 
“pervasively” motorized society more sustainable. A large part of the 
problem is the U.S. auto industry itself. In his ominously prescient 
words: “in 2004-2007, the American automobile industry has experienced 
financial difficulties strikingly similar to those experienced by street 
railways following World War I ... recent revenues have been 
insufficient to support the cost structures created during the golden 
days when they dominated the U.S. market.” (p. 189) With almost all 
their profits coming from the “light truck” segment of the market, 
American auto makers are vulnerable to gasoline  price spikes as well as 
to political pressure to improve fuel economy and lower CO2 emissions. 
They will have to make a “transformational change in the technology of 
the automobile,” and they will need a great deal of financial and 
regulatory support from public policy to pull it off.
	
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles seem to be Jones’ candidate for the 
transformational change. He identifies five preconditions that have to 
be met before hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can be widely diffused: cost 
competiveness with conventional vehicles, creation of a fueling 
infrastructure, decentralized reformation of natural gas into hydrogen 
at fueling stations, sequestration of the CO2 emissions associated with 
reformation, and acceptance of hydrogen’s safety by the public. He 
admits that the best estimates of the time frame for this extend from 15 
to 40 years in the future. Curiously, he gives almost no attention to 
electric vehicles, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrids. Electric 
power faces far fewer infrastructure and CO2 sequestration issues than 
hydrogen. And even GM’s California-mandated EV1 from the 1990s seemed 
popular with its “owners” who did not want to give it up at the end of 
their leases.

Finally, given how low American motor fuel taxes are compared to other 
highly motorized countries, Jones makes the case that a fuel surtax is 
the single best step we could take now. A 50 cent per gallon surcharge 
would barely bring U.S. gas taxes up to Canada’s level. But it would 
trigger a “cascade” of incremental, positive adjustments: people would 
buy more fuel efficient cars, manufacturers would produce more of them; 
more expensive gas would encourage more people to ride transit, and also 
provide more money to make transit more attractive. Jones admits that 
the surtax is “not an easy sale,” which is putting it mildly.

Jones has given us an excellent and insightful guide to the achievements 
and mistakes of twentieth century mobility policy. Looking forward, he 
is both appropriately modest in recognizing that historians can not 
predict the future and appropriately urgent in pointing out the serious 
policy problems we must solve to preserve the American system of mass 
motorization.


James A. Dunn, Jr. is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers 
University – Camden. He is the author of _Driving Forces: The 
Automobile, Its Enemies, and the Politics of Mobility_ (Brookings 
Institution Press, 1998), and co-author, with  Anthony Perl, of 
“Reframing Automobile Fuel Economy Policy in North America: The Politics 
of Punctuating a Policy Equilibrium” _Transport Reviews_  27, no.1 
(January 2007), 1-35. His email address is jadunn at camden.rutgers.edu.

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