The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility
all, more than sixty scholars within and beyond T2M cooperated in
this project, making it a truly collective work.
MOBILITY IN HISTORY
History: Planning, Building and Use (Neuchâtel, Alphil, 2007).
Gordon Pirie teaches and researches transport and travel. He has
published widely on aspects of past and present railway and air
transport in southern Africa. He has begun researching the history
of municipal airports in South Africa. His research into roads and
automobility in colonial Africa is ongoing.
Laurent Tissot is professor of contemporary history at the University
of Neuchâtel. He is currently dean of the Faculty of Humanities and
Human Sciences. His main fields of research are: business history,
tourism and transport history. His last publications: 'Le tourisme.'
Special issue of Entreprises et histoire (Paris, 2007).
www.alphil.ch
www.presssesuniversitairessuisses.ch
ISBN 978-2-940235-52-0
Arnaud Passalacqua
University of Rheims Champagne-Ardenne
The first historical works on public transport were published when those
services started in the 1820s-1830s, just as the first historical works on cars
appeared during the Belle Époque.1 Public transport arose during the nineteenth
century with industrialization and urbanization.2 European and North American
cases have received the most scholarly attention.
The modern academic history of public transport was born in the 1960s,
particularly, in the American historiography, with Sam Bass Warner’s book on
the shaping of Boston by streetcars during the end of the nineteenth century.3
In Europe, the impressive history of London public transport by Theo Barker
and Michael Robbins set an example of business and economic analysis.4
Streetcars have attracted more attention than the relatively scarce subways,
and except in London, where it enjoys a peculiar status, buses have inspired
1 For the Parisian case, note the book published just after the opening of the first omnibus network,
in 1828, which dealt with a more or less similar and previous attempt, led by the philosopher Blaise
Pascal in 1662 (Louis Jean Nicolas Monmerqué, Les carrosses à cinq sols, ou les omnibus du
dix-septième siècle (Paris, 1828)).
2 Still for the Parisian case, see Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris:
The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge and London, 1996).
3 Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (1870-1900) (Cambridge,
1962).
4 Theo Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport (London, 1963-1974).
243
Arnaud Passalacqua
little scholarship. Streetcars have also benefited from the interest of the well-
established community of railway historians.
Few historians have attempted a transnational perspective. An early example
is the American scholar John P. McKay, who in 1976 examined streetcars in
Europe. McKay explained how an American-born technology was variously
adopted in Western Europe.5 He sheds light on the social construction of street
railways within and between countries, but deals little with travelers. His study
is still influential. For instance, a recent issue of Ricerche storiche, edited by
Andrea Giuntini and Gregorio Núñez, tried to formulate the common conception
of public transport for Southern Europe.6
In his study of transport policy in Chicago from 1900 to 1930, Paul Barrett
examined streetcars, subways and elevated railroads.7 Barrett drew a picture
of social groups which competed to shape streets, emphasizing politics. In this
vein, Zachary M. Schrag’s history of the substitution of buses for streetcars in
New York during the interwar period (2000) is a convincing case.8 Schrag
reveals the political uses of technical objects, examining the modal tensions
between the bus, the subway and the streetcar.
This American literature identifies three main social groups that were essential
in the shaping and use of public transport: engineers, politicians and travelers.
But if the technical history of public transport is well known, the policy of
urban transport still needs more investigation. For instance a recent book on
the Parisian case impressively illustrated that point of view, but still considered
public transport riders as a secondary point in the historical analysis.9
Users have also received insufficient attention, perhaps because of their
inconspicuous archival record. The intellectual framework of historians also
leads them to be more interested in technical and political history and to forget
travelers. However, scholars have just begun to bring together an analysis of
technology, policy and use. For instance, in his recent book on the subway
in Washington, Zachary M. Schrag analyzes the political tensions before its
realization, describing the behavior of transit riders and even assessing the
5 John P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton,
1976).
6 Andrea Giuntini and Gregorio Núñez, ‘Reti di trasporti urbani nell’Europa Meridionale’,
Ricerche storiche, 37:2 (2007), 273-83.
7 Paul Barrett, The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago
1900-1930 (Philadelphia, 1983).
8 Zachary M. Schrag, ‘‘The Bus is Young and Honest’: Transportation, Politics, Technical Choice,
and the Motorization of Manhattan Surface Transit, 1919-1936’, Technology and Culture 41 (2000),
51-79.
9 Dominique Larroque, Michel Margairaz and Pierre Zembri, Paris et ses transports, XIXe - XXe
siècles. Deux siècles de décisions pour la ville et sa région (Paris, 2002)
244
Public transport
10 Zachary M. Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore,
2006)
11 Stefano Musso, Il trasporto pubblico a Torino nel secolo dell’industria: ATM, SATTI, GTT
(Torino, 2007).
12 Sheila Taylor (ed.), The Moving Metropolis: A History of London’s Transport since 1800 (London,
2002).
13 One of the most important works on workers in public transport is Nicholas Papayanis’s book on
Parisian coachmen (Nicholas Papayanis, Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris: Service Workers
and Class Consciousness (Baton Rouge and London, 1993)).
14 Brian J. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens and Transfers: a History of Urban Mass Transit in North America
(New York, 1990).
15 Colin Divall and Winstan Bond, Suburbanizing the Masses. Public Transport and Urban
Development in Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 2003).
16 See Jesús Mirás-Araujo’s recent article, ‘Spanish tramway as a vehicle of urban shaping: La
Coruña, 1903-1962’, Journal of Transport History 26, no 2 (2005): 20-37.
17 Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (Cambridge,
2008).
245
Arnaud Passalacqua
18 Hans Buiter, ‘Constructing Dutch streets: a melting pot of European technologies’, in ibid.:
141-162.
19 Elfi Bendikat, Offentliche Nahverkehrspolitik in Berlin und Paris 1890-1914. Structurbedingungen,
politische Konzeptionen und Realisierungsprobleme (Berlin, 1999).
246
Contents
Preface. ..............................................................................................................7
Gijs Mom, Gordon Pirie and Laurent Tissot
I The State of the Art
Tom McCarthy
The history and future of automotive fetishism. ...........................................83
David Gartman
II Continents and Countries
Peter Norton
A political turn: highways and mass transit in american mobility
history............................................................................................................117
Michael Fein
Mobility in Australia: unsettling the settled.............................................123
Georgine Clarsen
African mobility history: recent texts on past passages. ............................129
Gordon Pirie
Knitting a nation together: three themes in canadian mobility history.....137
Liz Millward
Transport in china before the industrial age: comparative research
issues...............................................................................................................141
Nanny Kim
From the Scythians to the Soviets: an evaluation of russian mobility
history............................................................................................................149
259
New developments in a neglected field: transport and mobility in
latin american recent historiography...........................................................159
Massimo Moraglio
National and transnational transport history: trends in recent dutch
research. ........................................................................................................173
Hans Buiter
All is politics: fifty years of mobility history in Belgium. .........................179
Donald Weber
Swiss traffic history: a research report. .....................................................187
Hans-Ulrich Schiedt
Still focussing on the railway: transport and mobility history in
Austria...........................................................................................................193
Bernd Kreuzer
An indistinct constellation: mobility history in Greece. ............................201
Aristotle Tympas and Irene Anastasiadou
Bulgarian state of the art: more transport than mobility history. ...........213
Emiliya Karaboeva
III Topics
Cotten Seiler
Gender and mobility: historicizing the terms...............................................235
Georgine Clarsen
Public transport: at the crossroads of urban history and the history
of mobility......................................................................................................243
Arnaud Passalacqua
Production versus mobility? new perspectives for an old dilemma. ...........247
Valentina Fava
Notes on contributors...................................................................................253
260
Gijs
Gijs Mom, Gordon Pirie, Laurent Tissot ( eds.)
The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility
all, more than sixty scholars within and beyond T2M cooperated in
this project, making it a truly collective work.
MOBILITY IN HISTORY
History: Planning, Building and Use (Neuchâtel, Alphil, 2007).
Gordon Pirie teaches and researches transport and travel. He has
published widely on aspects of past and present railway and air
transport in southern Africa. He has begun researching the history
of municipal airports in South Africa. His research into roads and
automobility in colonial Africa is ongoing.
Laurent Tissot is professor of contemporary history at the University
of Neuchâtel. He is currently dean of the Faculty of Humanities and
Human Sciences. His main fields of research are: business history,
tourism and transport history. His last publications: 'Le tourisme.'
Special issue of Entreprises et histoire (Paris, 2007).