Spaces of Congestion and Traffic

Spaces of Congestion and Traffic
Author: David Rooney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429016468
GET BOOK

This book provides a political history of urban traffic congestion in the twentieth century, and explores how and why experts from a range of professional disciplines have attempted to solve what they have called ‘the traffic problem’. It draws on case studies of historical traffic projects in London to trace the relationship among technologies, infrastructures, politics, and power on the capital’s congested streets. From the visions of urban planners to the concrete realities of engineers, and from the demands of traffic cops and economists to the new world of electronic surveillance, the book examines the political tensions embedded in the streets of our world cities. It also reveals the hand of capital in our traffic landscape. This book challenges conventional wisdom on urban traffic congestion, deploying a broad array of historical and material sources to tell a powerful account of how our cities work and why traffic remains such a problem. It is a welcome addition to literature on histories and geographies of urban mobility and will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of urban history, transport studies, historical geography, planning history, and the history of technology.

Interstate

Interstate
Author: Mark H. Rose
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-03-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1572337834
GET BOOK

This new, expanded edition brings the story of the Interstates into the twenty-first century. It includes an account of the destruction of homes, businesses, and communities as the urban expressways of the highway network destroyed large portions of the nation’s central cities. Mohl and Rose analyze the subsequent urban freeway revolts, when citizen protest groups battled highway builders in San Francisco, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and other cities. Their detailed research in the archival records of the Bureau of Public Roads, the Federal Highway Administration, and the U.S. Department of Transportation brings to light significant evidence of federal action to tame the spreading freeway revolts, curb the authority of state highway engineers, and promote the devolution of transportation decision making to the state and regional level. They analyze the passage of congressional legislation in the 1990s, especially the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), that initiated a major shift of Highway Trust Fund dollars to mass transit and light rail, as well as to hiking trails and bike lanes. Mohl and Rose conclude with the surprising popularity of the recent freeway teardown movement, an effort to replace deteriorating, environmentally damaging, and sometimes dangerous elevated expressway segments through the inner cities. Sometimes led by former anti-highway activists of the 1960s and 1970s, teardown movements aim to restore the urban street grid, provide space for new streetcar lines, and promote urban revitalization efforts. This revised edition continues to be marked by accessible writing and solid research by two well-known scholars.

Public Policy and Political Institutions

Public Policy and Political Institutions
Author: Frank Hendriks
Publisher:
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:
GET BOOK

To explore the impact of the new institutionalism in political science and public administration on "policy cultures," Hendriks (public administration, Tilburg U., the Netherlands) presents a comparative cultural-institutional analysis of traffic policy-making in Birmingham, UK and Munich, Germany. He provides evidence that political institutions influence the interaction between diverse views on car use policy issues, which in turn serve as vehicles (pun intended) shaping the course that policy processes take; and advocates "mobilizing bias" for policy-oriented learning in pluralistic democracies. Includes 1992 maps of the metropolitan area's road network for Birmingham and Munich, and maps of their respective city center roads. This is a translated, revised edition of the author's doctoral thesis (Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, 1996). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Urban Political Economy and Ecology of Automobility

The Urban Political Economy and Ecology of Automobility
Author: Alan Walks
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2014-07-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317659686
GET BOOK

Just how resilient are our urban societies to social, energy, environmental and/or financial shocks, and how does this vary among cities and nations? Can our cities be made more sustainable, and can environmental, economic and social collapse be staved off through changes in urban form and travel behaviour? How might rising indebtedness and the recent series of financial crises be related to automobile dependence and patterns of urban automobile use? To what extent does the system and economy of automobility factor in the production of urban socio-spatial inequalities, and how might these inequalities in mobility be understood and measured? What can we learn from the politics of mobility and social movements within cities? What is the role of automobility, and auto-dependence, in differentiating groups, both within cities and rural areas, and among transnational migrants moving across international borders? These are just some of the questions this book addresses. This volume provides a holistic and reflexive account of the role played by automobility in producing, reproducing, and differentiating social, economic and political life in the contemporary city, as well as the role played by the city in producing and reproducing auto-mobile inequalities. The first section, titled Driving Vulnerability, deals with issues of global importance related to economic, social, financial, and environmental sustainability and resilience, and socialization. The second section, Driving Inequality, is concerned with understanding the role played by automobility in producing urban socio-spatial inequalities, including those rooted in accessibility to work, migration status and ethnic concentration, and new measures of mobility-based inequality derived from the concept of effective speed. The third section, titled, Driving Politics, explores the politics of mobility in particular places, with an eye to demonstrating both the relevance of the politics of mobility for influencing and reinforcing actually existing neoliberalisms, and the kinds of politics that might allow for reform or restructuring of the auto-mobile city into one that is more socially, politically and environmentally just. In the conclusion to the book Walks draws on the findings of the other chapters to comment on the relationship between automobility, neoliberalism and citizenship, and to lay out strategies for dealing with the urban car system.

Traffic, Environment, Politics

Traffic, Environment, Politics
Author: Joop Schopman
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:
GET BOOK

The advance of motorized traffic has brought our attention to its disadvantages. Noise and exhaust gases do not just annoy people, they threaten human health and welfare. This book reports the scarcely available measurements of emissions to which adverse health effects are attributed. From these data it appears that although hardly any particular health effect can be scientifically proven to be caused by road traffic combined these effects strongly indicate that public health is endangered and action should be taken. The 1950-1980 efforts by the US government to formulate exhaust standards for cars are used to illustrate the political difficulties inherent in such undertaking.

Rites of Way

Rites of Way
Author: Alan Lupo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 330
Release: 1971
Genre: City planning
ISBN:
GET BOOK

Politics of locating Boston's Inner Belt freeway, with review of urban transportation planning and decisionmaking in U.S. cities.

Highways to Nowhere

Highways to Nowhere
Author: Richard Hébert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1972
Genre: Roads
ISBN:
GET BOOK

Case studies of urban transportation planning and development in Flint, Dayton, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

Fighting Traffic

Fighting Traffic
Author: Peter D. Norton
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2011-01-21
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262293889
GET BOOK

The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians, street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and 1930. Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.

Highway Madness!

Highway Madness!
Author: Renée Marie Blackburn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:
GET BOOK

Modern U.S. traffic safety policy is largely guided by three overarching principles that have influenced governments, industry, and community and citizen activists since the 1940s. The terms, education, engineering, and enforcement, detailed in the Action Program for Traffic Safety were developed by engineers and U.S. federal government traffic safety experts in response to growing concerns around rising traffic fatalities. In these guidelines, and the iterations that developed from them, responsibility for traffic safety shifted between drivers, policy makers, and the automotive industry. My dissertation examines the evolution of traffic safety policy, specifically looking at solutions to reach zero fatalities, over multiple decades. The traffic safety experts, including the auto industry, federal government, and community activists, striving for zero fatalities have reshaped traffic infrastructure, automotive regulation, and consumer perceptions of risky behaviors in an attempt to solve a major public health issue. Broadly following four themes, infrastructure, institutions, technology, and behavior, each chapter highlights how these actors mitigated risks and defined safety in order to find solutions to highway fatalities. To safety-concerned government officials and industry leaders, central actors in the development of federal traffic safety policy, traffic safety encompassed engineering, education, enforcement, citizenship, humanitarian, and moral issues. On the other hand, to women's community and activist groups, like MADD, traffic safety's focus was the education of drivers and pedestrians, and the prevention of crashes through educational and public health approaches. However, to working class white males, government mandated safety was viewed as an infringement upon their freedom as individuals to choose how to be safe and how to define their level of safety, regardless of its effects on others. Through analysis of these narratives emerges a more complete picture of the public health, education, and social policy implications of twentieth century traffic safety, the role of citizen activism in traffic safety policy development at the local, state, and federal levels, and the ways in which the traffic safety solutions have shifted over time.