history of transportation and travel evolution

The History of Transportation

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Whether by land or by sea, humans have always sought to traverse the earth and move to new locations. The evolution of transportation has brought us from simple canoes to space travel, and there's no telling where we could go next and how we will get there. The following is a brief history of transportation, dating from the first vehicles 900,000 years ago to modern-day times.

Early Boats

The first mode of transportation was created in the effort to traverse water: boats. Those who colonized Australia roughly 60,000–40,000 years ago have been credited as the first people to cross the sea, though there is some evidence that seafaring trips were carried out as far back as 900,000 years ago.

The earliest known boats were simple logboats, also referred to as dugouts, which were made by hollowing out a tree trunk. Evidence for these floating vehicles comes from artifacts that date back to around 10,000–7,000 years ago. The Pesse canoe—a logboat—is the oldest boat unearthed and dates as far back as 7600 BCE. Rafts have been around nearly as long, with artifacts showing them in use for at least 8,000 years.

Horses and Wheeled Vehicles

Next, came horses. While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when humans first began domesticating them as a means of getting around and transporting goods, experts generally go by the emergence of certain human biological and cultural markers that indicate when such practices started to take place.

Based on changes in teeth records, butchering activities, shifts in settlement patterns, and historic depictions, experts believe that domestication took place around 4000 BCE. Genetic evidence from horses, including changes in musculature and cognitive function, support this.

It was also roughly around this period that the wheel was invented. Archaeological records show that the first wheeled vehicles were in use around 3500 BCE, with evidence of the existence of such contraptions found in Mesopotamia, the Northern Caucuses, and Central Europe. The earliest well-dated artifact from that time period is the "Bronocice pot," a ceramic vase that depicts a four-wheeled wagon that featured two axles. It was unearthed in southern Poland.

Steam Engines

In 1769, the Watt steam engine changed everything. Boats were among the first to take advantage of steam-generated power; in 1783, a French inventor by the name of Claude de Jouffroy built the "Pyroscaphe," the world’s first steamship . But despite successfully making trips up and down the river and carrying passengers as part of a demonstration, there wasn’t enough interest to fund further development.

While other inventors tried to make steamships that were practical enough for mass transport, it was American Robert Fulton who furthered the technology to where it was commercially viable. In 1807, the Clermont completed a 150-mile trip from New York City to Albany that took 32 hours, with the average speed clocking in at about five miles per hour. Within a few years, Fulton and company would offer regular passenger and freight service between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi.

Back in 1769, another Frenchman named Nicolas Joseph Cugnot attempted to adapt steam engine technology to a road vehicle—the result was the invention of the first automobile . However, the heavy engine added so much weight to the vehicle that it wasn't practical. It had a top speed of 2.5 miles per hour.

Another effort to repurpose the steam engine for a different means of personal transport resulted in the "Roper Steam Velocipede." Developed in 1867, the two-wheeled steam-powered bicycle is considered by many historians to be the world’s first motorcycle .

Locomotives

One mode of land transport powered by a steam engine that did go mainstream was the locomotive. In 1801, British inventor Richard Trevithick unveiled the world’s first road locomotive—called the “Puffing Devil”—and used it to give six passengers a ride to a nearby village. It was three years later that Trevithick first demonstrated a locomotive that ran on rails, and another one that hauled 10 tons of iron to the community of Penydarren, Wales, to a small village called Abercynon.

It took a fellow Brit—a civil and mechanical engineer named George Stephenson—to turn locomotives into a form of mass transport. In 1812, Matthew Murray of Holbeck designed and built the first commercially successful steam locomotive, “The Salamanca,” and Stephenson wanted to take the technology a step further. So in 1814, Stephenson designed the "Blücher," an eight-wagon locomotive capable of hauling 30 tons of coal uphill at a speed of four miles per hour.

By 1824, Stephenson improved the efficiency of his locomotive designs to where he was commissioned by the Stockton and Darlington Railway to build the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on a public rail line, the aptly named "Locomotion No. 1." Six years later, he opened the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first public inter-city railway line serviced by steam locomotives. His notable accomplishments also include establishing the standard for rail spacing for most of the railways in use today. No wonder he’s been hailed as " Father of Railways ."

Technically speaking, the first navigable submarine was invented in 1620 by Dutchman Cornelis Drebbel. Built for the English Royal Navy, Drebbel’s submarine could stay submerged for up to three hours and was propelled by oars. However, the submarine was never used in combat, and it wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that designs leading to practical and widely used submersible vehicles were realized.

Along the way, there were important milestones such as the launch of the hand-powered, egg-shaped "Turtle " in 1776, the first military submarine used in combat. There was also the French Navy submarine "Plongeur," the first mechanically powered submarine.

Finally, in 1888, the Spanish Navy launched the "Peral," the first electric, battery-powered submarine, which also so happened to be the first fully capable military submarine. Built by a Spanish engineer and sailor named Isaac Peral, it was equipped with a torpedo tube, two torpedoes, an air regeneration system, and the first fully reliable underwater navigation system, and it posted an underwater speed of 3.5 miles per hour.

The start of the twentieth century was truly the dawn of a new era in the history of transportation as two American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, pulled off the first official powered flight in 1903. In essence, they invented the world’s first airplane. Transport via aircraft took off from there with airplanes being put into service within a few short years during World War I. In 1919, British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the first transatlantic flight, crossing from Canada to Ireland. The same year, passengers were able to fly internationally for the first time.

Around the same time that the Wright brothers were taking flight, French inventor Paul Cornu started developing a rotorcraft. And on November 13, 1907, his "Cornu" helicopter, made of little more than some tubing, an engine, and rotary wings, achieved a lift height of about one foot while staying airborne for about 20 seconds. With that, Cornu would lay claim to having piloted the first helicopter flight .

Spacecraft and the Space Race

It didn’t take long after air travel took off for humans to start seriously considering the possibility of going further up and toward the heavens. The Soviet Union surprised much of the western world in 1957 with its successful launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to reach outer space. Four years later, the Russians followed that by sending the first human, pilot Yuri Gagaran, into outer space aboard the Vostok 1.

These achievements would spark a “space race” between the Soviet Union and the United States that culminated in the Americans taking what was perhaps the biggest victory lap among national rivals. On July 20, 1969, the lunar module of the Apollo spacecraft, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, touched down on the surface of the moon.

The event, which was broadcast on live TV to the rest of the world, allowed millions to witness the moment Armstrong became the first man to ever step foot on the moon, a moment he heralded as “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  

• The History of Railroad Technology
• The History of Steamboats
• The History of Steam-Powered Cars
• George Stephenson and the Invention of the Steam Locomotive Engine
• 19th Century Locomotive History
• Biography of Robert Fulton, Inventor of the Steamboat
• How Do Steam Engines Work?
• The Origins of the Term, 'Horsepower'
• The Railways in the Industrial Revolution
• Great Father-Son Inventor Duos
• The History of the Tom Thumb Steam Engine and Peter Cooper
• Trains Coloring Book
• A History of the Automobile
• The Most Impactful Inventions of the Last 300 Years
• The Most Important Inventions of the 19th Century
• The History of Electric Vehicles Began in 1830

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What Travel Looked Like Through the Decades

Getting from point A to point B has not always been as easy as online booking, Global Entry , and Uber. It was a surprisingly recent event when the average American traded in the old horse-and-carriage look for a car, plane, or even private jet .

What was it like to travel at the turn of the century? If you were heading out for a trans-Atlantic trip at the very beginning of the 20th century, there was one option: boat. Travelers planning a cross-country trip had something akin to options: carriage, car (for those who could afford one), rail, or electric trolley lines — especially as people moved from rural areas to cities.

At the beginning of the 1900s, leisure travel in general was something experienced exclusively by the wealthy and elite population. In the early-to-mid-20th century, trains were steadily a popular way to get around, as were cars. The debut regional airlines welcomed their first passengers in the 1920s, but the airline business didn't see its boom until several decades later. During the '50s, a huge portion of the American population purchased a set of wheels, giving them the opportunity to hit the open road and live the American dream.

Come 1960, airports had expanded globally to provide both international and domestic flights to passengers. Air travel became a luxury industry, and a transcontinental trip soon became nothing but a short journey.

So, what's next? The leisure travel industry has quite a legacy to fulfill — fancy a trip up to Mars , anyone? Here, we've outlined how travel (and specifically, transportation) has evolved over every decade of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The 1900s was all about that horse-and-carriage travel life. Horse-drawn carriages were the most popular mode of transport, as it was before cars came onto the scene. In fact, roadways were not plentiful in the 1900s, so most travelers would follow the waterways (primarily rivers) to reach their destinations. The 1900s is the last decade before the canals, roads, and railway plans really took hold in the U.S., and as such, it represents a much slower and antiquated form of travel than the traditions we associate with the rest of the 20th century.

Cross-continental travel became more prevalent in the 1910s as ocean liners surged in popularity. In the '10s, sailing via steam ship was the only way to get to Europe. The most famous ocean liner of this decade, of course, was the Titanic. The largest ship in service at the time of its 1912 sailing, the Titanic departed Southampton, England on April 10 (for its maiden voyage) and was due to arrive in New York City on April 17. At 11:40 p.m. on the evening of April 14, it collided with an iceberg and sank beneath the North Atlantic three hours later. Still, when the Titanic was constructed, it was the largest human-made moving object on the planet and the pinnacle of '10s travel.

The roaring '20s really opened our eyes up to the romance and excitement of travel. Railroads in the U.S. were expanded in World War II, and travelers were encouraged to hop on the train to visit out-of-state resorts. It was also a decade of prosperity and economic growth, and the first time middle-class families could afford one of the most crucial travel luxuries: a car. In Europe, luxury trains were having a '20s moment coming off the design glamour of La Belle Epoque, even though high-end train travel dates back to the mid-1800s when George Pullman introduced the concept of private train cars.

Finally, ocean liners bounced back after the challenges of 1912 with such popularity that the Suez Canal had to be expanded. Most notably, travelers would cruise to destinations like Jamaica and the Bahamas.

Cue "Jet Airliner" because we've made it to the '30s, which is when planes showed up on the mainstream travel scene. While the airplane was invented in 1903 by the Wright brothers, and commercial air travel was possible in the '20s, flying was quite a cramped, turbulent experience, and reserved only for the richest members of society. Flying in the 1930s (while still only for elite, business travelers) was slightly more comfortable. Flight cabins got bigger — and seats were plush, sometimes resembling living room furniture.

In 1935, the invention of the Douglas DC-3 changed the game — it was a commercial airliner that was larger, more comfortable, and faster than anything travelers had seen previously. Use of the Douglas DC-3 was picked up by Delta, TWA, American, and United. The '30s was also the first decade that saw trans-Atlantic flights. Pan American Airways led the charge on flying passengers across the Atlantic, beginning commercial flights across the pond in 1939.

1940s & 1950s

Road trip heyday was in full swing in the '40s, as cars got better and better. From convertibles to well-made family station wagons, cars were getting bigger, higher-tech, and more luxurious. Increased comfort in the car allowed for longer road trips, so it was only fitting that the 1950s brought a major expansion in U.S. highway opportunities.

The 1950s brought the Interstate system, introduced by President Eisenhower. Prior to the origination of the "I" routes, road trippers could take only the Lincoln Highway across the country (it ran all the way from NYC to San Francisco). But the Lincoln Highway wasn't exactly a smooth ride — parts of it were unpaved — and that's one of the reasons the Interstate system came to be. President Eisenhower felt great pressure from his constituents to improve the roadways, and he obliged in the '50s, paving the way for smoother road trips and commutes.

The '60s is the Concorde plane era. Enthusiasm for supersonic flight surged in the '60s when France and Britain banded together and announced that they would attempt to make the first supersonic aircraft, which they called Concorde. The Concorde was iconic because of what it represented, forging a path into the future of aviation with supersonic capabilities. France and Britain began building a supersonic jetliner in 1962, it was presented to the public in 1967, and it took its maiden voyage in 1969. However, because of noise complaints from the public, enthusiasm for the Concorde was quickly curbed. Only 20 were made, and only 14 were used for commercial airline purposes on Air France and British Airways. While they were retired in 2003, there is still fervent interest in supersonic jets nearly 20 years later.

Amtrak incorporated in 1971 and much of this decade was spent solidifying its brand and its place within American travel. Amtrak initially serviced 43 states (and Washington D.C.) with 21 routes. In the early '70s, Amtrak established railway stations and expanded to Canada. The Amtrak was meant to dissuade car usage, especially when commuting. But it wasn't until 1975, when Amtrak introduced a fleet of Pullman-Standard Company Superliner cars, that it was regarded as a long-distance travel option. The 235 new cars — which cost $313 million — featured overnight cabins, and dining and lounge cars.

The '80s are when long-distance travel via flight unequivocally became the norm. While the '60s and '70s saw the friendly skies become mainstream, to a certain extent, there was still a portion of the population that saw it as a risk or a luxury to be a high-flyer. Jetsetting became commonplace later than you might think, but by the '80s, it was the long-haul go-to mode of transportation.

1990s & 2000s

Plans for getting hybrid vehicles on the road began to take shape in the '90s. The Toyota Prius (a gas-electric hybrid) was introduced to the streets of Japan in 1997 and took hold outside Japan in 2001. Toyota had sold 1 million Priuses around the world by 2007. The hybrid trend that we saw from '97 to '07 paved the way for the success of Teslas, chargeable BMWs, and the electric car adoption we've now seen around the world. It's been impactful not only for the road trippers but for the average American commuter.

If we're still cueing songs up here, let's go ahead and throw on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," because the 2010s are when air travel became positively over-the-top. Qatar Airways rolled out their lavish Qsuites in 2017. Business class-only airlines like La Compagnie (founded in 2013) showed up on the scene. The '10s taught the luxury traveler that private jets weren't the only way to fly in exceptional style.

Of course, we can't really say what the 2020 transportation fixation will be — but the stage has certainly been set for this to be the decade of commercial space travel. With Elon Musk building an elaborate SpaceX rocket ship and making big plans to venture to Mars, and of course, the world's first space hotel set to open in 2027 , it certainly seems like commercialized space travel is where we're headed next.

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6 Transportation Revolution

The transportation revolution in the United States began when Americans taking advantage of features of the natural environment to move people and things from place to place began searching for ways to make transport cheaper, faster, and more efficient. Over time a series of technological changes allowed transportation to advance to the point where machines have effectively conquered distance. People can almost effortlessly travel to anywhere in the world and can inexpensively ship raw materials and products across a global market.

But this technology is not ubiquitous, and it is not necessarily democratic. As a famous science fiction writer once said, the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. Modern transportation infrastructure is controlled to a great extent by large corporations, but the benefits of transport are depended on by everyone. And transportation technology itself requires specific conditions such as abundant, cheap, portable energy in the form of fossil fuels, and public infrastructure created by our own and foreign governments, that even those large corporations depend upon but don’t control.

When we think of transportation, it is natural to think first about going places. Getting on a plane in one hemisphere and getting off on the other side of the world is a life-changing opportunity which was unavailable to most people as little as a generation ago, and unthinkable two generations ago. But more crucial to our daily lives than the freedom offered by world travel is the cargo from the other side of the world that reaches us quickly in the holds of jets and more slowly but in almost unimaginable volume in containers on ships. The global transportation of foods, raw materials, and finished goods goes virtually unnoticed in our daily lives, but makes our contemporary consumer lifestyle possible.

Although even the early stages of the transportation revolution allowed people like seventy-year old Achsah Ranney, from Chapter Five’s Supplement, to travel regularly between her children’s homes in Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan, the more significant change was the ability of her sons and of other Americans to move freight from place to place. The ability to effectively ship food and other goods to where they were needed allowed people to stay put, and even to concentrate themselves in cities in a way they had never been able to do before. The growth of eastern cities depended just as much on the transportation revolution as did the building of new cities in the west.

As we have already seen, early Americans made amazing journeys with very primitive methods of transportation. The people who crossed Beringia and settled North and South America were able to cover startlingly long distances on foot. European explorers crossed dangerous oceans to visit the Americas in tiny ships. Human and animal power has been used extensively throughout American history, and is still used today to reach remote areas off the grid. But it is clear that improvements in transportation technology have been among the most powerful drivers of change in our history. And the transportation revolution has certainly changed our relationship with the American environment.

Technological improvements to ocean-going ships in the fifteenth century made European colonialism possible in the first place. Ships became bigger, faster, and safer. More people and goods could leave the safety of coastal waters and cross the oceans, and the places these improved ships connected became centers of trade, population, and wealth. This pattern of growth repeated itself as new technologies were developed to help Americans expand across the continent.

As we have seen, American colonists depended on trade with England and with the sugar planters of the West Indies to make their outposts in New England and Virginia successful. But from the beginning of the American Revolution to the conclusion of the War of 1812, relations between the new nation and Britain were tense and trade suffered. If it had not found a way to ship people and goods to and from its own frontier, the United States would have remained a coastal nation focused on ports like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The barely-remembered Whiskey Rebellion of 1791, when George Washington led United States troops against American farmers in western Pennsylvania, was really about transportation. Farmers west of the Appalachian mountains could not easily haul wagon-loads of grain to eastern markets, so they turned their harvests into a more portable product by distilling grain into whiskey. The farmers believed the government’s excise tax on distilled spirits had been instituted to drive them out of the whiskey business for the benefit of large Eastern distillers. Since they had few other sources of income, the tax was a serious issue for westerners. Luckily, the incoming Jefferson administration repealed the tax in 1801 and increasing Ohio River shipping provided new outlets for western produce.

Roads and Rivers

On the eve of the Revolution, the only road that did not hug the east coast followed the Hudson River Valley into western New York on its way to Montreal (this was one reason colonial Americans seemed continually obsessed with the idea of conquering Montreal and bringing it into the United States). Less than thirty years later, riders working for the Post Office Department carried mail to nearly all the new settlements of the interior. The postal system’s designer, Benjamin Franklin, understood that in order for the new Republic to function, information had to flow freely. Franklin set a low rate for mailing newspapers, insuring that news would circulate widely in the newly-settled areas. But it was one thing carrying saddlebags filled with letters and newspapers to the frontier, and something else moving people and freight.

Rivers were the first important routes to the interior of North America. The Ohio River, which begins at Pittsburgh and flows southwest to join the Mississippi, helped people get to their new farms in the Ohio Valley and then helped them carry their farm produce to markets. The Ohio River Valley became one of the first areas of rapid settlement after the Revolution, along with the Mohawk River Valley in western New York. The importance of river shipping is illustrated by the fact that over fifty thousand miles of tributary rivers and streams in the Mississippi watershed were used to float goods to the port of New Orleans. The dependence of western farmers on the Spanish port also explains why New Orleans was a considered strategic city by the United States in the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory had actually begun as an attempt to buy the city of New Orleans, and Andrew Jackson’s defense of the port during the War of 1812 was vital to insuring the success of western expansion.

Early westward expansion depended on rivers, and towns and cities built during this era were usually on a waterway. Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Paul all owe their locations to the river systems they provide access to. Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee utilize the Great Lakes in the same way. These lakeside cities exploded after the Erie Canal opened a route from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and allowed New York to overtake New Orleans as the nation’s most important commercial port. The 363-mile Erie Canal was so successful that another four thousand miles of canals were dug in America before the Civil War.

In 1800, it took nearly two weeks to reach Buffalo from New York City, a month to get to Detroit, and six grueling weeks of travel to arrive at the swampy lake-shore settlement that would become Chicago. Thirty years later, Buffalo was just five days away, Detroit about ten days, and Chicago less than three weeks. Horses pulled canal boats from towpaths on shore, eliminating the strain of travel for the boats’ passengers. Floating along on calm water was infinitely more comfortable than spending weeks on a wagon, in a cramped stage coach, or on horseback. The number of people willing to make long trips increased accordingly. And the amount of freight shipped to New York, after the canal cut shipping costs by over ninety percent, increased astronomically. Goods flowed along the Canal in both directions, offering life-changing opportunities. As mentioned previously, within ten years of the Erie Canal’s completion, the last fulling mill processing homespun cloth in Western New York shut its doors. Women no longer had to spend their time spinning wool and weaving their own textiles to make their family’s clothing. They could buy bolts of wool and cotton fabrics from the same merchant at the local general store who ground their family’s grain into flour and shipped it on the Canal to eastern cities. With fewer demands on their time, many women were able to not only improve their own quality of life, but contribute to family income by taking in piece-work, raising cash crops, or keeping cows and churning butter for sale to their local merchants.

The Age of Steam

Steam technology changed the nature of transportation. Until steam engines were put on riverboats, shipping had depended on either wind and river currents or on human and animal power. Goods could easily be floated south from farms on the nation’s rivers, but it was much more difficult and expensive to ship products against the rivers’ currents to the frontier. Flatboats and rafts accumulated at downstream ports, and were often broken down and burned as firewood. Steam engines made it possible to sail upstream as easily and nearly as quickly as down, causing an explosion of travel and shipping that radically changed frontier life.

Steam engines were a product of early European industrialism. The first steam patent was granted to a Spanish inventor named Jerónimo Beaumont in 1606, whose engine drove a pump used to drain mines. Englishman James Watt’s 1781 engine was the first to produce rotary power that could be adapted to drive mills, wheels, and propellers. Robert Fulton, an American inventor who had previously patented a canal-dredging machine, visited Paris and caught steamboat fever. Fulton sailed an experimental model on the Seine, and then returned home and launched the first commercial American steamboat on the Hudson River in 1807. The Clermont was able to sail upriver 150 miles from New York City to Albany in 32 hours. In 1811, Fulton built the New Orleans in Pittsburgh and began steamboat service on the Mississippi.

Although Robert Fulton died just a few years later of tuberculosis, his partners Nicholas Roosevelt and Robert Livingston carried on his business, and the age of riverboats was underway. Like Fulton’s prototype and the Clermont, the New Orleans was a large, heavy side-wheeler with a deep draft. It was not the most efficient design for shallow water, and it did not take long for ship-builders to settle on the familiar shallow-draft rear-paddle riverboats that carried freight on the Mississippi and its tributaries well into the 20th century. The shallower a riverboat’s draft, the farther upriver it could travel. Steam-powered riverboats soon pushed the transportation frontier to Fort Pierre in the Dakota territory and even to Fort Benton, Montana. Riverboats made it possible to ship goods in and out of nearly the whole area Thomas Jefferson had acquired in the Louisiana Purchase just a generation earlier. And steam-powered ocean shipping made the markets of Britain and Europe readily accessible to farmers and merchants in the middle of North America.

The other transportation technology enabled by steam power, of course, was the railroad. But railroads were even more revolutionary than steamboats. In spite of their power and speed, steam-powered riverboats depended on rivers or occasionally on canals to run, but a railroad could be built almost anywhere. Suddenly, the expansion of American commerce was no longer limited by the routes nature had provided into the frontier.

America’s first small railroads had actually been built on the East Coast before a steam engine was available to power them. Trains of cars were pulled by horses and looked a lot like stage-coaches on rails. But after Englishman George Stephenson’s locomotives began pulling passengers and freight in northwestern England in the mid-1820s, Americans quickly switched to steam. The first locomotive used to pull cars in the United States was the Tom Thumb, built in 1830 for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Although Tom Thumb lost its maiden race against a horse-drawn train, Baltimore and Ohio owners were convinced by the demonstration of steam technology and committed to developing steam locomotives. The railroad, which had been established in 1827 to compete with the Erie Canal, already advertised itself as a faster way to move people and freight from the interior to the coast. Adding steam engines accelerated rail’s advantage over canal and river shipping.

Over 9,000 miles of track had been laid by 1850, most of it connecting the northeast with western farmlands. The Mississippi River was still the preferred route to market from Louisville and St. Louis south. But Cincinnati and Columbus became connected by rail to the Great Lake ports at Sandusky and Cleveland, giving the northern Ohio Valley faster access to New York markets. Detroit and Lake Michigan were also connected by rail, making the long steamboat trip around the northern reach of Michigan’s lower peninsula unnecessary.

By 1857, rail travelers could reach Chicago in less than two days and could be almost anywhere in the northern Mississippi Valley in three. On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Chicago was already becoming the railroad hub of the Midwest. The Illinois Central Company had been chartered in 1851 to build a rail line from the lead mines at Galena to Cairo, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers joined. Galena is also located on the Mississippi on the northern border of Illinois, but rapids north of St. Louis made transporting ore on the river impossible, illustrating the advantage of rails over rivers. A railroad line to Cairo, with a branch line to Chicago, would also attract settlers and investors to Illinois. Young Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln helped the Illinois Central lobby legislators and receive the first federal land grant ever given to a railroad company. The company was given 2.6 million acres of land, and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas helped design the checkerboard distribution of parcels that would become common for railroad land grants. The map below shows the extent of the land the government gave to the Illinois Central Company, which a few years later showed its gratitude by helping to finance Lincoln’s Presidential campaign against Douglas.

The North’s advantage over the Confederate South in railroad miles and the Union Army’s ability to move troops and supplies efficiently had a definite impact on the outcome of the Civil War. In the years following the war, the shattered South added very little railroad track and repaired only a small percentage of the tracks the Union Army had destroyed during the war. While railroads languished in the South, rail miles in the North exploded. In 1869, the West Coast was connected through Chicago to the Northeast, when the Union and Central Pacific Lines met at Promontory Point Utah on May 10th. The building of a transcontinental railroad was made possible by the Pacific Railroad Act, which President Lincoln had signed into law in 1862.

Public or Private?

The Pacific Railroad Act was the first law allowing the federal government to give land directly to corporations. Previously the government had granted land to the states for the benefit of corporations. The Act granted ten square miles of land to the railroad companies for every mile of track they built. Land next to railroads always increased in value. The unprecedented gift of ten square miles of rapidly-appreciating land for every mile of track was a tremendous incentive to railroad companies to lay just as much track as they possibly could. Decisions to build lines were frequently based on the land granted, rather than on whether or not railroad companies expected the new lines to carry enough traffic or generate enough freight revenue to pay for themselves. In the eighteen years between the original Illinois Central grant of 1851 and the completion of the transcontinental line in 1869, privately-owned railroads received about 175 million acres of public land at no cost. This amounts to about seven percent of the land area of the contiguous 48 states, or an area slightly larger than Texas. For comparison, the Homestead Act distributed 246 million acres to American farmers over a 72-year period between 1862 and 1934, but required homesteaders to live on and to farm the land continuously for five years or pay for their parcel. The justification for the residency requirement was that the government was concerned homesteaders would become speculators and flip their farms. Railroad land grants were made with no similar stipulations because railroad corporations were expected to sell the lands they were given at a substantial profit.

It has often been argued that a national infrastructure project as large as a transcontinental railway could never have been built without government assistance. The West Coast and western territories needed to be brought into the Union, some historians have argued, and the only way to achieve this was with government-supported railroads. Ironically, the same people who make this argument usually also claim that it would have been disastrous for the government to have owned the railroads it had made possible with its legislation, loans, and land grants. An undertaking of this scope and scale, they say, requires that corporations be given monopolies and grants of natural resources and public credit. These arguments make it seem inevitable that giant corporations taking huge gifts from the public sector were the only way for America to move forward and build a rail network. However, history shows that this was not the only way a national rail system could have been built.

There are numerous examples of rail systems built and managed by the public sector in foreign countries, especially during the nineteenth century when nearly every rail system outside the United States was state-owned and operated. However, for the sake of simplicity we will restrict the comparison to the United States. The Northern Pacific Railway, a private corporation chartered by Congress in 1864, built 6,800 miles of track to connect Lake Superior with Puget Sound. In return, the corporation was given 40 million acres of land in 50-mile checkerboards on either side of its tracks. Not only did the Northern Pacific rely on the government for land and financing, the railroad used the services of the U.S. Army to protect its surveyors and to move uncooperative Indians out of its way. When the Northern Pacific’s proposed route cut through the center of the Great Sioux Reservation, established by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the corporation pressured the government to break the treaty. George Custer announced that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills after an 1874 mission protecting Northern Pacific surveyors, and Washington let the treaty be disregarded by both the railroad and the prospectors. The Indians responded with the Great Sioux War of 1876, which culminated in the Battle of Little Big Horn, where Custer and his Seventh Cavalry were wiped out by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse leading a force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. But although the Indians won the battle, they lost the war. Less than a year later, Sioux leaders ceded the Black Hills to the United States in exchange for subsistence rations for their families on the reservation.

In contrast, Canadian-American railroad entrepreneur James Jerome Hill built his Great Northern Railroad line from St. Paul to Seattle during the last decades of the nineteenth century without causing a war and without receiving a single acre of free public land. The Great Northern bought land from the government to build its right of way and to resell to settlers. Hill claimed proudly that his railway was completed “without any government aid, even the right of way, through hundreds of miles of public lands, being paid for in cash.” The Great Northern system connected the Northwest with the rest of the nation through St. Paul, using a web of over 8,300 miles of track. And because Hill only built lines where traffic justified them rather than adding track just to collect free land, the Great Northern was one of the few transcontinental railroad companies to avoid bankruptcy in the Panic of 1893.

Regardless of the ways they were financed and built, the proliferation of railroads caused explosive growth. Chicago was a frontier village of 4,500 people in 1840. When Lincoln helped the Illinois Central receive the first land grant in 1851, the city’s population was about 30,000. Twenty years later Chicago was the center of a rapidly-growing railroad network, and the city held ten times the people. In 1880 Chicago’s population was over 500,000, and ten years later Chicago had over a million residents. We will take a closer look at the changes railroads brought to Chicago in a Chapter Seven.

Internal Combustion

America’s transportation revolution did not end with steamboats and railroads and was not limited to public transportation technologies. The development of the automobile ushered in a new era of personal mobility for Americans. Internal combustion engines were inexpensive to mass produce and much easier to operate than steam engines. With the development of automobiles and trucks around the turn of the twentieth century, it no longer required a huge capital investment and a team of engineers to purchase and operate motorized transportation. Even the workers on Henry Ford’s assembly lines could aspire to owning their own Model Ts, especially after Ford doubled their wages to $5 a day in January 1914.

Engineers had experimented with building smaller machines using steam engines, and there were several examples in Europe and America of successful steam-powered farm tractors, trucks, and even a few horseless carriages. But internal combustion engines delivered much greater power relative to their mass, allowing smaller machines to do more work. The first internal combustion farm tractor was built by John Froehlich at his small Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company in 1892. Others began applying internal combustion to farm equipment, and between 1907 and 1912 the number of tractors in American fields rose from 600 to 13,000. Eighty companies manufactured more than 20,000 tractors in 1913. After an auspicious beginning, Froehlich’s little Iowa company grew slowly and began building farm tractors in volume only after World War I. The Waterloo company built a good product, and was acquired by the John Deere Plow Company in 1918. Deere remains the world leader in self-propelled farm equipment.

The first internal combustion truck was built by Gottlieb Daimler in 1896, using an engine that had been developed by Karl Benz a year earlier. World War I spurred innovation and provided a ready market for internal combustion trucks that were much less expensive than their steam-powered rivals. By the end of the war gasoline-powered trucks had overtaken the steam truck market. Most large trucks now burn diesel fuel rather than gasoline, using a compression-ignition engine design patented by Rudolf Diesel in 1892.

Internal combustion trucks and tractors, like cars, allowed people to go farther, carry more, and do more work than had been possible using human and animal power. And they were much more affordable than comparable steam-based vehicles and easier to build at a scale that encouraged individual use and ownership. Trucking eventually challenged rail transport, especially after the development of semi-trailers and the Interstate Highway System. Although the first diesel truck engines only produced five to seven horsepower, they advanced quickly. Indiana mechanic Clessie Cummins built his first, six-horsepower diesel engine in 1919. The business bearing his name is now a global corporation doing $20 billion in annual business, mostly in diesel engines. Cummins’s current heavy truck engine is rated at 600 horsepower.

While it is easy to focus on the inventions and technological innovations of the internal combustion era, we should not lose sight of the infrastructure improvements that made these innovations valuable. Without paved roads to run on, there would have been far fewer cars and trucks and their impact on society and the environment would have been much different. The biggest road-building project in American history was the construction of the Interstate Highway System, financed by the Federal-Aid Highway Acts of 1944 and 1956. Unlike the transcontinental railroad project of the 1860s, the Interstate Highway System was paid for by the federal government and the roads are owned by the states. The system includes nearly 47,000 miles of highway, and the project was designed to be self-liquidating, so that the cost of the system did not contribute to the national debt. In addition to the Interstate System, American states, counties, cities and towns maintain systems of roads totaling nearly four million miles, about two-thirds of which are paved.

Gasoline vs. Ethanol

The economic trade-off of internal combustion for the farmers and teamsters who first adopted it was that speed and power came at a price. Where horses and oxen were readily available in farm communities and were cheap to maintain, tractors and trucks were a substantial investment. And unlike horses and oxen, tractors and trucks needed to be fueled with petroleum that made them dependent on a faraway industry. However, this dependence was not inevitable. Henry Ford and Charles Kettering, the chief engineer at General Motors, had both believed that as engine compression ratios increased, their companies’ engines would transition from gasoline to ethyl alcohol. We are all aware that the shift to ethanol did not happen, but why it did not is less well-known and may surprise you.

Most history books faithfully repeat the inaccurate story that Edwin Drake’s famous 1858 oil strike in Titusville Pennsylvania came just as the world was running out of expensive whale oil. Actually, there was a thriving market for alcohol fuel in the mid-nineteenth century United States. Ethanol was price-competitive with kerosene, and unlike kerosene it was produced by many small distillers, creating widespread competition that would continue to drive down prices. Unfortunately for ethanol producers and fuel consumers, the alcohol fuel industry was wiped out when the Lincoln administration imposed a $2.08 per gallon tax on distilled alcohol between 1862 and 1864. A gallon of Standard Oil kerosene still cost only 58 cents, so kerosene took over the American fuel market. Of course, after kerosene became the only available fuel, Standard Oil was free to raise prices as it saw fit.

But ethanol still had its advocates. The very first American internal combustion engine, built in 1826 by Samuel Morey, had used grain alcohol because it was inexpensive and readily available. Nearly a century later, Henry Ford’s Model T was designed to be convertible between kerosene, gasoline, and ethanol. General Motors chief engineer Kettering was convinced it was only a matter of time until ethanol became the fuel of choice.

So why aren’t we all driving cars running renewable fuels? Part of the answer, as you have probably already guessed, is that Standard Oil made the auto industry an offer they couldn’t refuse. The oil company used its vast distribution network to make gasoline available everywhere it was needed, and insured that the price was so low that competitors could not profit if they entered the market. Standard Oil pioneered the practice of pricing below their cost of production to run competitors out of the business. The profits of the company’s many other divisions subsidized their short-term losses on gasoline. Predatory pricing was one of the principal charges made against the company in the 1911 antitrust case that resulted in the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust.

But Standard Oil’s predatory pricing does not tell the whole story of why we do not run cars on ethanol. The rest of the story, if anything, is even more sinister. It has long been known that using gasoline at high compression results in engine knocking. It was also well-known that ethanol did not knock. Charles Kettering at General Motors had argued for years that the “most direct route which we now know for converting energy from its source, the sun, into a material suitable for use as a fuel is through vegetation to alcohol.” The technology was simple and Americans had been distilling alcohol fuels for generations. Unfortunately, Kettering worked for a corporation whose major shareholder was the Du Pont family, who also happened to own the largest corporation in the chemical industry. It would be impossible for DuPont to profit or for General Motors to gain a competitive advantage using alcohol fuels, since the distilling technology was universally available and the product was un-patentable. However, there was an extremely profitable alternative.

Tetraethyl Lead (TEL) was a lubricating compound that could be added to gasoline to eliminate knocking. General Motors received a patent on its use as an anti-knock agent, and Standard Oil was granted a patent on its manufacture which was later extended to include DuPont. The three companies founded Ethyl Corporation to market TEL and other fuel additives. Unfortunately, lead is a powerful neurotoxin, linked to learning disabilities and dementia. The federal government had misgivings about allowing lead additives, and in 1925 the Surgeon General temporarily suspended TEL’s use and government scientists secretly approached Ford engineers seeking an alternative. In the 1930s, 19 federal bills and 31 state bills were introduced to promote alcohol use or blending. But the American Petroleum Industries Committee lobbied hard against them. Under intense industry pressure, the Federal Trade Commission even issued a restraining order forbidding commercial competitors from criticizing Ethyl gasoline as unsafe. By the mid-1930s, 90 percent of all gasoline contained TEL. Airborne lead pollution increased to over 625 times previous background levels, and the average IQ levels of American children dropped 7 points during the leaded-gas era. By the 1980s, over 50 million American children registered toxic levels of lead absorption and 5,000 Americans died annually of lead-induced heart disease. When public concern continued to increase, the Ethyl Corporation was sold in 1962 in the largest leveraged buyout of its time. In the 1970s the newly-established Environmental Protection Agency finally took the stand other federal agencies had been afraid to take. The EPA declared emphatically that airborne lead posed a serious threat to public health, and the government forced automakers and the fuel industry to gradually eliminate the use of lead. TEL is now illegal in automotive gasoline, although it is still used in aviation and racing fuels. Unleaded gasoline is now used in all new internal combustion cars. But while pure ethanol has powered most automobiles in Brazil since the 1970s, most Americans continue to use a blend containing just 10% ethanol to 90% gasoline.

Global Cargo

Two additional forms of transportation became increasingly important as the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first century began. Commercial airplanes are only a little over a hundred years old and the first air cargo and airmail shipments were flown in 1910 and 1911. Air cargo was considered too expensive for all but the most valuable shipments until express carriers such as UPS and Federal Express revolutionized the shipping business in the 1990s. The global economy now measures air freight volumes in ton-miles. In 2014, the world shipped more than 58 billion ton-miles of goods. Air freight also allows perishable items like fresh fruits and vegetables to be transported across oceans and continents from producers to consumers. This is a big business. Over 75 million tons of fresh produce are air-shipped annually, worth more than $50 billion.

For nonperishable items, container shipping has created a single global market. Standardized containers were invented by a trucker named Malcolm McLean, who realized it would save a lot of time and energy if his trucks didn’t need to be loaded and unloaded at the port, but could just be hoisted on and off a cargo ship. McLean refitted an oil tanker and made his first trip in 1956, carrying fifty-eight containers from Newark to Houston. Current annual shipping now exceeds 200 million semi-trailer sized containers. Containers can be shipped by sea, rail, truck, and even air, allowing just-in-time operators like Wal-Mart to manage a supply chain that relies much less on warehoused inventory, and more on product in transit.

But just as shifting from horse power to a gasoline truck or tractor a hundred years ago involved economic trade-offs, shopping at Wal-Mart today introduces a new level of dependence. We not only rely on transportation systems and the fuels they run on, but also on supply-chain software, international trade agreements and currency fluctuations, and even on the political situations of faraway nations. As long as the costs of inputs like fuel and infrastructure like ports, highways, and open borders remains low, the global market is a great deal for the consumer and a source of immense profits to businesses and their shareholders. But a company like Wal-Mart is just as dependent on factors it cannot control as its customers are. If any of these factors change, who will bear the cost?

https://youtu.be/N9gfTs3JnAk

Further Reading

Bill Kovarik, “Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and the Fuel of the Future,” Automotive History Review , Spring, 1998. Available online at www.environmentalhistory.org

Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Larger , 2006.

Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations or 1867-1914 and their Lasting Impact , 2005

George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 , 1977.

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The Geography of Transport Systems

The spatial organization of transportation and mobility

Transport Revolutions in Human History

Source: adapted from R. Gilbert and A. Perl (2007) Transport Revolutions: Moving people and freight without oil, London: Earthscan / James & James.

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Infrastructure: mass transit in 19th- and 20th-century urban america.

• Jay Young Jay Young Outreach Officer, Archives of Ontario
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.28
• Published online: 02 March 2015

Mass transit has been part of the urban scene in the United States since the early 19th century. Regular steam ferry service began in New York City in the early 1810s and horse-drawn omnibuses plied city streets starting in the late 1820s. Expanding networks of horse railways emerged by the mid-19th century. The electric streetcar became the dominant mass transit vehicle a half century later. During this era, mass transit had a significant impact on American urban development. Mass transit’s importance in the lives of most Americans started to decline with the growth of automobile ownership in the 1920s, except for a temporary rise in transit ridership during World War II. In the 1960s, congressional subsidies began to reinvigorate mass transit and heavy-rail systems opened in several cities, followed by light rail systems in several others in the next decades. Today concerns about environmental sustainability and urban revitalization have stimulated renewed interest in the benefits of mass transit.

• mass transit
• transportation
• urban growth

Mass transit—streetcars, elevated and commuter rail, subways, buses, ferries, and other transportation vehicles serving large numbers of passengers and operating on fixed routes and schedules—has been part of the urban scene in the United States since the early 19th century. Regular steam ferry service connected Brooklyn and New Jersey to Manhattan in the early 1810s and horse-drawn omnibuses plied city streets starting in the late 1820s. Expanding networks of horse railways emerged by the mid-19th century. A half century later, technological innovation and urban industrialization enabled the electric streetcar to become the dominant mass transit vehicle. During this era, mass transit had a significant impact on American urban development, suburbanization, the rise of technological networks, consumerism, and even race and gender relations. Mass transit’s importance in the lives of most Americans started to decline with the growth of automobile ownership in the 1920s, except for a temporary rise in transit ridership during World War II. In the 1960s, when congressional subsidies began to reinvigorate mass transit, heavy-rail systems opened in cities such as San Francisco and Washington D.C., followed by light rail systems in San Diego, Portland, and other cities in the next decades. As the 21st century approached, concern about environmental sustainability and urban revitalization stimulated renewed interest in the benefits of mass transit.

The history of urban mass transit in the United States is more complex than a simple progression of improved public transportation modes before the rise of the automobile ultimately replaced transit’s dominance by the mid-20th century. Transit history in American cities is rooted in different phases of urbanization, the rise of large corporate entities during the industrial era, the relationship between technology and society, and other broad themes within American history. At the same time, mass transit history shows the value of emphasizing local contexts, as the details of urban transit unfolded differently across the United States based on municipal traditions, environments, economies, and phases of growth.

Ferry Boats, Omnibuses, and the Beginnings of Mass Transit in the Early 19th Century

The ferry boats that regularly crossed the waters of a few American cities in the early 19th century provided an important precedent to the mass transit industry that emerged later in the century. Before the age of industrialization, the cities of the American merchant economy were primarily sites of commercial exchange of goods and services. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and most other urban centers were dense, port cities located along rivers, bays, and other bodies of water. And while this geography facilitated the transshipment of goods, it also impeded the expansion of urban settlement. During the early 1810s, Robert Fulton, an engineer and inventor, established a regular ferry service using steam power. The service linked lower Manhattan with Jersey City over the Hudson River, as well as the village of Brooklyn , at the time a small suburban settlement across the East River. The early development of regular ferry service illustrates the dominant role that New York City would play in American urban mass transit—not surprising considering the city’s rapid demographic and physical growth and dominant position in the hierarchy of American cities during the 19th century. Ferries also demonstrate the early connections between transit and urban expansion, as the service allowed commuters living in areas such as the newly subdivided Brooklyn Heights neighborhood to overcome obstacles for continuous settlement posed by bodies of water. Typically, regular users of this service enjoyed above-average incomes and social positions. Unlike most working people, they could afford the expense of a daily fare. 1 By the 1860s, the annual ridership of New York’s ferry industry had expanded to more than 32 million people. Thirteen companies employed seventy steamboats for more than twenty different ferry routes. 2 Similar service had also spread to other northeastern cities, such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Ferry service is still an integral part of daily commuting in some cities today. Despite its success, however, ferry boat service could do little to improve transportation over land. 3

By the late 1820s, New York also became home to the first significant form of land-based mass transit: the omnibus. This operation—a large horse-drawn wheeled carriage similar to a stagecoach yet open for service to the general public at a set fare—originated in Nantes, France, in 1826 . Omnibus service spread to Paris two years later and to other French cities as well as London by 1832 . 4 Abraham Brower brought the service to New York in 1828 when he launched a route running a mile and a quarter along Broadway. Brower’s original vehicles, Accommodation and Sociable , held approximately twelve passengers. 5 Three years after Brower inaugurated service, more than one hundred omnibuses traveled on New York streets. 6 By the 1840s, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other American cities had omnibus service. It spread from larger to smaller cities in subsequent decades. 7

The omnibus had weaknesses. Since most vehicles featured unpadded seats and typically travelled on uneven cobblestone roads (if paved at all), passengers experienced an uncomfortable ride. 8 The fare—generally 12 cents—was too expensive for most urban dwellers. Nonetheless, the omnibus initiated a “riding habit” of regular transit use within its main segment of users: members of the urban middle class. This growing demographic found private stagecoaches too expensive, but they had the affluence and desire to commute to work instead of walking. 9 Although getting around by foot remained the main source of mobility for most urban dwellers, the “walking city” was slowly eroding.

Horsecars: The “American Railway”

A vehicle with less surface friction could reduce the shortcomings that had plagued the omnibus. Horse streetcars—commonly known as horsecars —traveled on rail instead of road, and had numerous advantages over the omnibus. The use of rails provided a faster, quieter, more comfortable ride, while enabling a more efficient use of horse power. This fact allowed for larger cars that carried approximately three times as many riders as the omnibus. Importantly, the horsecar’s lower operating cost per passenger mile translated to a cheaper fare for users (typically 5 cents compared to the 12-cent omnibus fare) and a growing “riding habit” within the American urban population. 10 Horsecars reduced the time and cost of commuting to and from the central core, and, thus, they expanded the area of development along the urban fringe. Following a slow start, other American cities adopted horsecars by the 1850s, part of the wider context of rampant urbanization during the second half of the 19th century. Typically, a private company ran lines under a franchise awarded by the municipality that outlined the public roads on which the company could build rails and operate routes, along with other stipulations. By the end of the 1850s, New York, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cincinnati provided horsecar service. Further expansion developed during the 1860s. 11 Two decades later, almost twenty thousand horsecars traveled on more than thirty thousand miles of street railway across the United States. Such expansion was particularly notable in contrast to comparatively slower growth in Europe (where people called the technology “American Railways”). 12 The horsecar’s initial development in the United States, and its early spread across the country, exemplified how the country was often at the forefront of transit use and technological innovation during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

The world’s first horsecar line began service in 1832 , when the New York and Harlem Railroad Company inaugurated a horse-powered rail car route along Fourth Avenue. The franchise owners, including banker John Mason, intended the line to serve as the first stage of a passenger steam railway linking lower Manhattan to Harlem. However, fears of noise, smoke, and boiler explosions from those living along the right-of-way prompted the city to prohibit the railroad from operating steam engines within the built-up area south of Twenty-Seventh Street, so the company relied upon horse power within the restricted area. 13 Despite the operating advantages of horsecars, its “technology transfer” to other American cities was slow until the early 1850s. This phenomenon reinforced the value of local contexts, as horsecar lines developed differently in each city based on factors such as local politics, geography, and population density. Horsecars—and the rails upon which they travelled—began a process of redefining the meaning of city streets that continued with electric streetcars and automobiles. The street became more a place for mobility, diminishing the centrality of sociability, recreation, and other traditional street uses. Initially, popular sentiment opposed the placement of rails along streets, especially since rails were not flush with the street surface and impeded cross movement until the invention of grooved rails in 1852 . That same year, New York saw its first horsecar operation distinct from steam railroads, and the service soon spread to many other American locales. 14

Historians Joel Tarr and Clay McShane demonstrate that horsecars exemplify how the rise of industrialization and urbanization during the 19th century led to a growing exploitation of horse power. Ironically, steam power, an essential component of the first Industrial Revolution, created a greater demand for this older form of energy in industrial cities. 15 Yet the horsecar’s reliance on these “living machines” presented the greatest weakness of the technology, especially as cities sought to expand their systems once easily commutable distances from the urban fringe via horsecar were reached. Horses were expensive to maintain. They ate their value in feed each year, required large stables and care from veterinarians, stablehands, and blacksmiths, and their average work life lasted less than five years. 16 In terms of social costs, horses produced massive amounts of pollution as their manure and urine fell on city streets. And once horses met their ultimate fate, their bodies had to be removed. New York alone disposed of fifteen thousand horse carcasses annually. 17 Sudden disease outbreaks were common. The most dramatic occurred in 1872 , when an equine influenza epidemic —the “Great Epizootic”—hit North America (especially eastern seaboard cities). Thousands of horses died during the epidemic, which created operational upheaval for the horsecar industry. Not surprisingly, the event further reinforced the need for cheaper, more reliable forms of transit power. 18

Steam was one alternative source of power. It had provided power for ferry services since the 1810s and passenger railways two decades later. By the mid-19th century, commuter railways using steam locomotives (essentially short-haul passenger rail) connected affluent residents living in small suburban areas to places of work and entertainment in large cities. For example, upper-middle-class towns, such as New Rochelle and Scarsdale in Westchester County, New York, grew with commuter rail service to New York City, while Evanston, Highland Park, Lake Forest, and other commuter towns emerged around Chicago. 19 Yet steam power presented challenges for urban transit. Many city dwellers living along crowded streets considered the noise, pollution, and other dangers associated with the technology to be nuisances. Steam operation also generally cost more than horse power until the 1870s. A few New York companies gambled on steam-powered conveyances during the 1860s, but they all soon ceased their experiments. 20 Nonetheless, transit companies in greater New York and Chicago began building elevated railroads using steam power above urban thoroughfares. This proved to be among the earliest forms of rapid transit, since vehicles operated on their own right-of-way, not in mixed traffic. By 1893 , Jay Gould’s New York Elevated Railroad Company carried half a million daily passengers from lower Manhattan to the Bronx, while Chicago saw the first line of its “L” system open in 1892 . Although short-lived “elevateds” existed in the smaller cities of Sioux City, Iowa, and Kansas City, Missouri, high capital costs made them mostly a big city phenomenon unlikely to become a dominant mode of transit across the United States. 21 Elevateds also darkened the street below. Once electricity became a possible power source by the 1890s, city dwellers clamored for rapid transit to burrow underground.

Power generated from a stationary central source—rather than within a moving locomotive—offered another alternative. Cable cars traveled on rail, similar to horsecars and steam railways, but these vehicles clasped on a moving cable within a street conduit. This feature eliminated much of the noise, smoke, and danger of boiler explosions that plagued urban steam locomotives (although such nuisances were still present at the stationary power source). Cable car operation began in San Francisco in 1873 , when Andrew Hallidie began his service on Clay Street . San Francisco’s hilly terrain required four horse teams to pull a single omnibus, with some hills too steep for any kind of horse service. 22 Since various transit experiments in steam, compressed air, chemical engines, and electricity failed to produce an inexpensive method of propulsion, cable cars seemed the best alternative to horse power by the 1870s. Following Hallidie’s successful operation, most large cities across the United States built cable car networks. 23

With hindsight, the cable car emerged as a temporary solution for the transit industry until the refinement of a more efficient power distribution method. Cables had advantages over horse power, but they also carried particular weaknesses. Cables were always under the threat of snapping. Maintenance and replacement constituted a complex, expensive process that negatively affected service. Ice buildup produced issues in colder cities. The cable had to run at the same capacity no matter the service level, which meant power generation could not diminish at off-peak times. Twenty years after Hallidie’s first run on Clay Street, more than three hundred miles of cable car tracks had been laid across the United States. But numbers declined soon after electric streetcar operation became practical in the 1890s. By 1913 , only twenty miles of cable car track were still in use. 24 Electric streetcars and other electric transit technologies exacerbated the changes in urban life that horsecars and cable cars had unleashed.

Transit Becomes Electric

Technological innovations, demand from the transit industry for improved operations, and a desire for mobility enabled the electric streetcar to become the dominant mass transit vehicle in the United States by the turn of the 20th century. The streetcar’s use of electricity makes it a key technology of the second Industrial Revolution. “[N]o invention,” urban historian Kenneth Jackson has argued, “had greater impact on the American city between the Civil War and World War I than the visible and noisy streetcar and the tracks that snaked down the broad avenues into undeveloped land.” 25 The idea of transmitting electrical current to move vehicles had existed since the 1840s, but no practical technique could generate sufficient electrical power. Experiments with battery power also failed in terms of feasible, everyday operation. 26 Early streetcar pioneers such as Leo Daft and Charles van Depoele made significant advances to the technology; however, Frank Sprague (1857–1934) is most commonly associated with the vehicle’s development. Similar to names associated with other critical technologies, Sprague was not the sole “inventor” of the electric streetcar. Rather, as transit historian Brian J. Cudahy explains, Sprague’s success derived from “his ability to blend aspects of previous experiments with his own developments into a fully orchestrated whole.” 27 A former Edison employee, his key technical contribution was a trolley poll and wheel design that overcame previous flaws whereby overhead electrical wires detached from vehicles (and thus the power source). Sprague’s system also demonstrated operational reliability and financial feasibility when it was put to the test along twelve miles of track for the Union Passenger Railway in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888 . Twelve years later, 90 percent of all streetcars in the United States relied on his patents, and few horsecars were still in operation. 28

Street railway companies quickly adopted electricity. Often, they used existing rails and even former horsecar vehicles. 29 Electric streetcars transformed the transit industry. New forms of expertise related to electricity replaced veterinarians, blacksmiths, and other horse-related professions. The new technology also generated mergers with large companies swallowing up smaller enterprises, monopolizing service in urban areas, and employing corporate business forms in order to raise capital needed for investment in electricity infrastructure (in some cases, electrical utility companies were also transit providers). Transit remained within the private market in most American cities until the second half of the 20th century, but the organizational structure of the industry became more complex. 30

Electric streetcars rapidly spread across the country. Like horsecars decades earlier, electric streetcars accommodated heavier passenger loads compared to predecessors. This reduced passenger cost per mile, lowered fares, and stimulated greater transit use by wider segments of society. Two years after Sprague’s Richmond success, the vehicle carried twice the number of passengers in the United States compared to the rest of the world, with thirty-two thousand electric streetcars traversing American streets from small towns to major metropolises—a number that nearly doubled by the turn of the century. 31

Electric traction also removed an obstacle for underground transit. The London Underground had operated steam-powered trains when it opened in 1863 , but most commentators believed Americans would avoid smoke-filled subway tunnels. The massive construction cost also impeded subway building. In 1894 , the Massachusetts legislature authorized Boston to build the first subway in the United States. The line, which was completed four years later, buried 1.5 miles of a busy streetcar under Tremont Street’s retail district. The Boston Transit Commission, a public body, financed construction, while the private West End Street Railway operated the line and serviced its debt. 32 Public money was also required to build the country’s largest subway network in New York—foreshadowing the growing role of the state in mass transit in the second half of the 20th century. In 1904 , the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s service began connecting the Bronx to Manhattan, followed by the construction of hundreds of more miles of subway in New York during subsequent decades. 33

The Effects of Electric Streetcars on Urban Life

Streetcars and other forms of electric traction had a tremendous influence on the shapes and sensations of urban life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In many cases, the technology exacerbated trends that began with the horsecar. Streetcars continued the horsecar’s role in enabling the seemingly contradictory yet related forces of centralization and dispersal in American cities. In essence, this entailed the general separation between major commercial activities in the downtown and districts of residence and other activities, such as manufacturing, in less dense areas surrounding the core and along the urban fringe. The American walking city—in which the dominant mode for the journey to work was by foot—came to an end, although many workers still walked to their places of employment.

The many streetcar lines that radiated from central business districts across the United States increased accessibility to and from downtown. The shapes, spectacles, and symbols of what is still associated today with “downtown”—business skyscrapers and other tall buildings as well as large theaters, department stores, hotels, and other palaces of consumption—emerged with the arrival of horsecars, but they reached a new scale with electric streetcars. Electric traction had a centralizing effect by increasing land values in the core and creating the economy of large buildings and places of entertainment during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These attractions relied upon other technologies such as the elevator, telephone, and electric light, yet the rise of skyscrapers and other iconic elements of the modern urban landscape would have been unlikely without streetcars. 34

Streetcars played a dramatic role in suburbanization. Unlike the natural limits of horsecars, electric streetcars could journey well beyond the existing city once trackage was laid. In Boston, for example, the area of urban settlement expanded from two miles outside the old walking city core during the horsecar era to four miles during the first decade of electric streetcar service. 35 Suburban living was more readily available to Americans of the growing middle class and in the skilled trades from cities as varied as New York City to Milwaukee. Those who worked within the older city but could not afford the daily ten-cent round trip fare were forced to stay (or walk long distances from the urban fringe). 36 The characteristics of “streetcar suburbs” differed across and within cities, yet they also shared similarities. For example, accessible, cheap land enabled suburban residential developments of semi-detached or detached dwellings set back from the street and surrounded by a yard (apartments also existed). Walkability remained important for at least some daily tasks and, of course, for the journey to the nearby streetcar stop. Thus, on the whole, streetcar suburbs had fairly compact forms and high population densities compared to the automobile-centric suburbs that developed later in the 20th century, although such forms and densities varied based on local influences, levels of affluence, and other factors. Real estate speculators knew the value of streetcar service to their developments. In many cases, transit companies held real estate interests along the urban fringe, which they connected via streetcar to spur development, even if the line itself was unprofitable. Yet the many streetcar suburbs that still dot the American landscape today were not simply the result of ambitious developers, but also the desires and actions of many people, from local politicians to the varied residents who made such places home.

Various social factors joined the development and expansion of the electric streetcar to create the new scale of suburbanization at the turn of the 20th century. The streetcar did not solely create the suburbs; the relationship was more complex. The experience of suburbanization in the United States evolved differently from that in Europe, where dense row housing continued to develop along the urban fringe. Demand existed for suburbanization—and its distinct shapes and forms—as well as the technologies that made it possible. Scholars have often explained such demand through the value placed by Americans on private property ownership and the 19th-century belief in the “rural ideal.” To these factors, historian Clay McShane has added popular ideas about public health that emerged during the second half of the 19th century. The miasmic theory of disease contended that vapors emanating from rotting organic matter caused illness. To counter these miasmic threats, Americans sought suburban environments filled with grass, trees, and fresh air. 37 Ironically, the new scale of suburbanization generated by electric streetcars created new social issues, such as the growing geographic division of wealth and political fragmentation within the American metropolis. 38

Transit also enabled new social experiences associated with the modern age. Whereas streetcars linked people to department stores, theaters, and other attractions of downtown, the technology also connected riders to attractions at the end of the line. Amusement parks were the most prominent. Transit companies often owned such parks as a means to generate more passenger traffic in outer areas and on off-peak times: weekends and holidays. For example, Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park originated as a natural springs attraction served by omnibus service and became a large amusement park after the Atlanta Street Railway assumed control of it by the turn of the 20th century. Even one of the greatest attractions at amusement parks—the rollercoaster—had a connection to transit technology; it turned apprehensions about new transit technology (such as the fear of accidents) into a sensorial thrill. According to David Nye, destinations at both ends of the streetcar line—the downtown department store and the amusement park along the urban fringe—promoted a consumerist, mass society that “subverted the Victorian moral code” of thrift and self-restraint. 39

Electric streetcars, along with subways and elevated railroads, allowed for new ways of seeing the city and its inhabitants. Riding within a swift, enclosed transit vehicle emphasized a visual understanding of the urban landscape. In particular, elevateds allowed for a comprehensive, panoramic view of the city that was unattainable by walking on the ground. The interiors of transit vehicles also became essential public spaces by forcing face-to-face contact between people of varying racial, class, and gender identities. Crowded rush-hour cars such as those of the New York elevateds and subways made social contact particularly common. 40 Ironically, transit interiors became points of intimate contact at the same time that the American city, through suburbanization via transit technology, was becoming more residentially segregated by race and class. 41

Yet streetcars or other forms of transit also reinforced social differences. They were “moving theaters” of racial conflict, according to historian Robin Kelley. 42 In antebellum America, omnibus companies in New York and Philadelphia forbade African Americans from riding in their vehicles, while slaves sometimes rode with their white owners or in separate conveyances in southern cities. 43 Segregated transit was at the center of Jim Crow–era discrimination in the South. Although the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956—sparked by the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her bus seat to a white passenger—is rightly remembered as a major moment in the Civil Rights movement, African Americans participated in failed protests in at least twenty-five southern cities against the injustice of Jim Crow laws during the first decade of the 20th century. These laws, following the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessey v. Ferguson ( 1896 ), dictated black riders sit in the back of transit vehicles and give up their seat to white riders if they sat in the middle section. 44 Women had mixed experiences using transit. Spaces within a transit vehicle were common sites of sexual harassment, especially after streetcar companies switched to one-man operations by eliminating guards and ticket collectors who used to watch over passengers in the early 20th century. Such harassment led Julia D. Longfellow of the Women’s Municipal League in 1909 to request the operator of New York’s Interborough Rapid Transit to provide a female-only car during rush hours (higher operating costs motivated the private company to reject her request). 45 On the other hand, streetcars and other forms of mass transit allowed for opportunities for greater freedom, through urban mobility, for women, who constituted a high percentage of transit users. A ride on a streetcar embodied the complex contradictions of American urban life during the age of modern technology.

The Decline of Mass Transit in 20th-Century America

Mass transit’s importance in the lives of city dwellers decreased by the 1920s. This decline lasted until the 1970s, and, in many ways, it has continued to the present. The roots of this trend emerged during the early 20th century. From 1890 to 1905 , annual streetcar ridership across the country more than doubled from two billion to five billion passenger trips. However, over the next two decades ridership grew at a slower rate. From 1917 to 1923 , the industry added only one billion more annual trips. Annual transit ridership (all modes including subway, streetcar, and bus) peaked in 1926 (excluding exceptional war-related conditions during the 1940s and early 1950s), with more than seventeen billion passenger trips—a figure since unmatched. The slowdown in transit ridership growth coincided with an explosion of automobile ownership and use: in 1910 , Americans owned less than half a million automobiles, a figure that rose to eight million vehicles in 1920 . 46 Mass transit’s fall in prominence is more complicated than simply the invention and popularity of the private automobile, for as historians of technology remind us, no technology is innately superior to another. Rather, social values and practices influence the acceptance of technologies based on complex factors. Multiple reasons within and outside of the transit industry explain declining passenger numbers during the 20th century.

Starting in the 1910s, inflation imposed pressure on the overwhelmingly private-owned transit industry. Transit companies began to reduce investment in their capital stock before World War I. 47 Inflation led to increased prices for materials (the value of steel rails rose by 50 percent after the war) and other costs. Labor, the largest part of the industry’s operating costs, also became more expensive as more workers unionized. 48 Greater demand for better service from interest groups—not only users who protested against any hike to the common five-cent fare, but also politicians and business groups—compounded these economic forces by making more difficult the implementation of positive reforms that could have improved the competitiveness of transit against the automobile.

Another challenge originated with jitneys: privately owned automobiles operated by entrepreneurs who cruised streets (typically those with transit routes) in search of possible customers. Passengers enjoyed the jitney’s flexibility, especially its ability to drop off riders closer to their destination compared to the same cost as a streetcar. Unlike transit companies, jitneys usually were unlicensed and paid no municipal fees or taxes. Transit operators saw jitneys as unfair competition and pressured local governments to prohibit the service in many cities. The jitney enjoyed only short-lived success, but it provided but one example of how the automobile threatened the transit industry. 49

The popular perception that transit was a private business, rather than a public service deserving government aid, added to the industry’s woes. Years of negative sentiment from passengers, politicians, and other interest groups about poor service, corruption, and large profits hindered the industry. Historian Paul Barrett argues that municipal ordinances passed in Chicago in 1907 enforced levels of service on the city’s private transit provider, but they failed to provide a subsidy that would make such service financially feasible. Instead, either complete municipal ownership or minimal regulation constituted better alternatives. San Francisco had municipalized transit in 1912 , but few cities followed suit until the 1950s. 50 Transit was not alone in suffering from negative opinion; the automobile did too, despite its relative newness. Historian Peter Norton has shown that a consensus of politicians, city planners, and most citizens believed automobile use on city streets should be highly regulated to ensure not only the safety for other road users (especially pedestrians), but also the efficient flow of traffic. The young automobile industry countered such sentiment by branding its product as the symbol of individual freedom. It also lobbied policymakers. This strategy allowed “motordom” to gain policy concessions for items such as parking restrictions, often at the expense of the transit industry and other street users. 51 The private nature of the automobile also may have influenced transit users to drive cars, especially women. The automobile created its own problems, but many ex-transit passengers believed it offered a better alternative to the mixed company in a crowded streetcar, often filled with cigarette smoke and other harassing passengers. 52

The bus, a vehicle on wheels employing an internal combustion engine, also illustrates the changing tide of transit between 1920 and 1940 . Bus service emerged during the first decade of the 20th century and its use grew during the 1920s, when enterprising companies decided to service new suburban developments located past the termini of streetcar lines. Although most streetcar companies initially feared the bus, they increasingly saw it as a flexible vehicle with low capital costs that competed with the automobile and served areas with lower ridership levels. A survey in 1924 revealed that little more than one thousand buses plied American streets, but this figure jumped to at least twenty thousand buses eight years later. 53 Buses slowly replaced streetcar lines across the country. While more than seventy thousand streetcars operated in 370 cities in 1912 , only 1,200 vehicles serviced seven cities five decades later. 54

Scholars and other analysts offer varied explanations for the replacement of streetcars by buses across the United States. One interpretation claims that the phenomenon emerged as part of a conspiracy by General Motors. This argument became popular in the early 1970s, when lawyer Bradford Snell testified in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee. He contended that General Motors, under its National Coach Lines subsidiary, purchased a number of transit companies during the 1930s and 1940s in order to convert streetcar lines to bus operation, with the purpose of weakening or eliminating transit service so that disgruntled passengers would purchase automobiles. The theory even entered popular culture as inspiration for a plotline in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit . Although the investigation ultimately found that GM broke anti-trust laws, the central conspiratorial charge—the provision of poor transit service in order to increase automobile sales—was not the basis of the investigation. In fact, most transit historians and other scholars generally disregard the conspiracy theory. National Coach Lines controlled approximately 10 percent of the country’s urban transit systems, yet a majority of the remaining 90 percent of companies also switched to buses. Moreover, a consensus within the transit industry believed that buses—operating without the capital concerns of rails—possessed economic and operational benefits compared to streetcars, especially on lower density systems and lines. 55 The case of bus substitution in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s suggests politics played a role in the shift rather than rational cost-benefit considerations of each mode of transport. Historian Zachary Schrag argues that the streetcar-bus debate served as a “proxy” for other issues such as public ownership, regulation, and fare prices. 56 Technological novelty also played a part; to most passengers, a new bus seemed more modern in comparison to streetcars, which many passengers saw as the antique relics of corrupt private transit companies. 57 Regardless, buses likely saved the mass transit industry during the post–World War II era, when ridership numbers continued to plummet. Implementation of diesel engines and automatic transmissions in buses by the 1940s also reduced energy costs even as these innovations led to noise, pollution, and other negative consequences on the urban environment. 58

World War II saw a steep but temporary rise in ridership—in fact the highest in the mass transit industry’s history. The booming war economy created a strong demand from passengers requiring transit for work trips, especially compared to the rampant unemployment and declining rider figures during the Great Depression. Wartime gasoline and rubber rationing, and an automobile production ban, also led to increased ridership. Yet the boom failed to solve the transit industry’s larger issues, which were evident before the war. In fact, the wartime riding experience hurt transit in the long run. Passengers in Detroit and other industrial cities crowded into packed, often dilapidated transit vehicles, which created uncomfortable riding situations and even racial conflict. These memories surely remained with former riders who decided to purchase automobiles once the conflict ended. 59

After the war, the longer trajectory of declining passenger numbers resumed. Numerous transit companies faced financial ruin, which led to public ownership in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other larger cities in the immediate postwar era. In smaller towns, transit often ceased operation. Despite the wave of public takeovers during the late 1940s and 1950s, the popular conception of transit as a service run on a cost-recovery basis remained unchanged. Service failed to improve significantly enough to curtail declining ridership. 60 At the same time, the postwar years marked the growth of automobile-dependent suburbs and car ownership as well as a rapid push for road building. In 1956 , President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which dedicated twenty-five billion dollars to build more than forty thousand miles of limited-access roadways across the country. 61 Although transit’s decline began decades before the federal government constructed new highways in the postwar era, the interstate program—which funded 90 percent of urban expressway costs—demonstrated the federal government’s enthusiasm for automobility. By the 1950s, the United States had become “car country,” according to Christopher Wells. 62 Meanwhile, the transit industry suffered. But change was around the corner.

Federal Funding and a Return to Ridership Stability

Mass transit has made a modest comeback since the 1960s, when the federal government began to subsidize transit expansion on a broad scale. The push for federal funding originated from a coalition of railroad executives and big city mayors. In the late 1950s, rail companies with major freight operations cut many of their unprofitable commuter rail services that served large metropolitan areas. Together, the mayors and rail companies fought for a national transportation policy from the federal government that recognized the importance of mass transit, not just highways and automobiles. Older cities worried that further decline of transit would diminish the competitive advantages of their central cores over more peripheral areas in terms of business services and manufacturing. And middle-class suburbanites who relied on commuter rail worried about the loss of a service that connected them to places of work, consumption, and leisure. A few precedents for capital funding from government existed, for example, municipal funds for subways in Boston and New York City, and federal funding for the Chicago subway during the Great Depression and World War II. 63

These lobbying efforts came to fruition in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Urban Mass Transportation Act (UMTA). The legislation enabled capital grants from the federal government to cover a maximum of two-thirds the capital costs of equipment and facilities for transit systems. 64 Over the next decade, Washington provided more than three billion dollars, which cities used to purchase private systems, improve existing vehicles and infrastructure, and build new systems. From 1965 to 1974 , the number of publicly owned transit systems rose from less than sixty to more than three hundred. Yet federal funding alone did not solve transit’s woes, as ridership across the country continued to decline in the years following the passage of the act in 1964 . 65

More dramatically, a few cities used new federal funding to construct rapid transit systems. The idea that transit operating in its own right-of-way could best compete with the automobile and the nation’s growing expressway network constituted a major impetus for such large-scale, expensive transit systems. Postwar rapid transit was often debated within the wider context of desires for regional government and planning. San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), approved by area residents in a municipal referendum in 1962 , took advantage of federal funding after 1964 . Although the original push for BART came from downtown business interests, it was also supported by politicians, the media, and residents, who believed that rapid transit could improve the growing region’s traffic congestion, especially following the end of streetcar service across the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland during the mid-1950s. When BART opened in 1972 , it made use of unproven, space-age technology designed by aerospace firms in an attempt to create a more modern transit riding experience. This reliance on unproven technology led to cost overruns and technical problems, but BART quickly became a key part of the San Francisco Bay area’s distinctive urban landscape. 66

The other new major system developed in the nation’s capital. The Washington Metro originated from ideas within planning circles during the 1950s to build a small rapid transit system in conjunction with a larger network of automobile freeways. Inner-city residents feared the damage that the controversial Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac River as well as other freeway plans would have on their communities and the local environment. They pushed for a larger rapid transit system as an alternative to the expressway web. The eventual 100-mile Metro system faced challenges, including a period of stalled capital funding from expressway proponents before a congressional vote stopped the logjam. The first leg of the system opened in 1976 with subsequent sections opening during the next three decades. Despite initial ridership numbers that were lower than originally projected, Metro historian Zachary Schrag argues that the project embodied admirable goals of Great Society–era liberalism: the value of the public realm and the belief in the ability of government to improve the daily lives of its citizens. 67

Federal funding since the 1960s has had a mixed legacy. Both contemporary scholars and historians looking back at the program are critical. For example, they question UTMA’s endorsement of rapid transit systems, which often had ridership numbers far lower than initial projections that were used to promote such networks. An early articulation of this argument came from John Meyer, John Kain, and Martin Wohl in their The Urban Transportation Problem ( 1965 ). Published soon after President Johnson signed UTMA and based on quantitative analysis, the study criticized transit funding from an economic perspective. 68 Promoters of the Washington Metro had naively argued that ambitious ridership projections would mean that fares alone could cover all operating and even some capital expenses, a belief that became untenable with inflation during the 1970s. But others, such as Schrag, believe that quantitative critiques overlook the more qualitative benefits that public funding for transit in general—and rapid transit more specifically—has given cities. Schrag cites the positive impact of the Metro on Washington, where rapid transit has reduced the city’s reliance on cars, freeways, and gasoline, created more sustainable developments, and improved the mobility of residents—especially those who choose or are unable to own a car because of personal finances, age, or disability. 69

The 1970s marked a turning point for transit in the United States. Transit historian Brian Cudahy has even suggested that the decade saw the beginning of a “transit renaissance” in the United States. 70 In statistical terms, the long decline of annual passengers since the late 1920s (with the exception of World War II) ended in 1973 , although per capita rides continued to decline. This resurgence arose from many factors: growing ecological consciousness from the environmental movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, revolts by citizens against the negative consequences of urban freeways, energy crises, and general disillusionment with the dominant car culture and other problems in American cities. To those searching for an alternative to the automobile, transit seemed like a viable solution to various urban issues, from redevelopment to social equity. Federal subsidies also influenced transit’s reversal of fortunes. By the 1970s, funding from Capitol Hill that began in the previous decade started to make its mark. Major rapid transit systems in San Francisco, Washington, and Atlanta opened for use. 71 In 1973 , Congress listened to expressway protesters and authorized cities to use funds for transit projects that had been earmarked for the Interstate Highway System. These funds failed to go as far as expressway dollars. Whereas federal funds covered 90 percent of expressway projects, Washington provided only four dollars for every dollar spent by local authorities for transit. 72 Federal funds also began to provide operating subsidies for transit the following year, with passage of the National Mass Transportation Assistance Act. 73

Since the 1980s, numerous cities have built light rail transit (LRT) systems. With LRT, vehicles operate on lines with dedicated rights-of-way but power is supplied by overhead wires instead of a third rail. LRT requires lower capital costs and ridership levels compared to heavy rail systems, and LRT projects have become more common than capital-intensive heavy rapid transit systems such as BART and the Washington Metro. Escalating construction costs and a more restrictive environment of federal funding for capital projects is one motivation for LRT’s rise, which began in the early 1980s. 74 In a development that has proved fascinating to the historian, nostalgia and heritage have also contributed to the popularity of rail transit developments since the 1980s. Cities have kept or built “heritage” streetcar lines (or cable cars in San Francisco) along downtown streets with tourist dollars in mind. When the first LRT line in the United States opened in 1981 , it was called the “San Diego Trolley,” despite little similarity between the new line and the trolleys that served the city until the late 1940s. Most passengers today have no personal memory of riding streetcars, and so LRT and heritage lines are commonly associated with a vibrant urbanism of the early-20th-century American city rather than the more negative streetcar sentiments and experiences held by many people at the time. 75 The place of the past within current transit branding demonstrates just one example of why the history of mass transit matters today.

Discussion of the Literature

Urban mass transit has been a focus of academic historical research since the 1960s. Sam Bass Warner Jr. produced the first major academic work on the subject. 76 He examined the connections between changing forms of transit technology (namely horsecars and electric streetcars) and residential growth in the Boston suburbs of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester. Relying on sources such as censuses, land deeds, government reports, and local histories, Warner focused on the impact street railways and other institutions—as well as the choices of individual builders and residents—had on the metropolitan landscape. He also paid attention to the relationship between commuting and the geography of class, as he noted the overwhelmingly middle-class nature of the new suburbs in contrast to the higher proportion of poorer residents concentrated in the inner city. Warner, writing during the era of suburban “white flight” and the transformation of the inner city through urban renewal, defined this process of suburban–inner city segregation by class as “the central event of the 1870s–1900 era.”

Historical research on mass transit history continued during subsequent decades. Such interest developed as part of the growth of urban history during this time, as scholars sought to uncover the historical roots and wider contexts of housing issues, racial segregation, and economic inequality that came to the surface in American cities during the postwar “urban crisis.” In the wake of rising concern over air pollution, energy use, and the impact of automobiles on the urban fabric, several works focused on the historical factors that had led to the rise and fall of mass transit (and related, the rise of urban automobile use). Increased attention to transit also followed federal funding starting in the 1960s. 77 Brian J. Cudahy has looked at the issue from a national perspective. Other authors have selected single cities—Scott Bottles on Los Angeles or Paul Barrett on Chicago, for example—as their case studies or took a comparative approach in order to emphasize how such processes unfolded in different locales. A common thread running through much of this work emphasized the technological choices behind various transit forms and the political relationships among private transit providers, local governments, and various interest groups.

A growing body of work by urban historians surveys the impact of suburbanization on American life since the 19th century. 78 The connections between suburbanization and mass transit, along with the growth in automobility and road building, serve as major aspects of the work. Clay McShane used an innovative approach to examine the impact of transportation patterns on urban life. 79 He argued that the rising popularity of the automobile in the early 20th century derived from changing social perceptions of the street as traffic corridors rather than public spaces, a trend that had begun with the railway and mass transit in the 19th century. Peter Norton built on this approach to uncover the highly contested nature of the street in American cities as different interest groups, including mass transit operators and users, fought for or against its transformation via the automobile. 80

More recently, the influences of environmental history and cultural history have made their mark on the study of mass transit. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have focused on an integral part of the horsecar that historians had previously ignored: the animal that powered the vehicle. They show the essential role that horses had on not only mass transit, but also the wider processes of change in the industrial American city. David Nye’s work on electricity has emphasized the need to consider the creation of social meaning as key in understanding the influence of the electric streetcar and other transit technologies. To Nye, the electric streetcar emerged as part of a constellation of technologies at the turn of the 20th century that influenced the transition to the modern American city based on consumerism and spectacle. Recent scholarship has also focused less on the elite decisions made within corporate boardrooms and political offices and more on the daily experiences of transit passengers. Robin Kelley and others have conceptualized the transit vehicle as a contested public space in which the practices of racial and gender inequality in everyday life were reinforced and challenged. Others, influenced by a growing emphasis on the user within the history of technology and mobility studies, have examined how unfavorable experiences of transit may have influenced former passengers to purchase automobiles.

While the dynamics of mass transit during the 19th and early 20th century has received a fair amount of attention from scholars, the subject’s more recent history has received far less attention. For instance, broad histories of mass transit in the United States rightly emphasize earlier eras when more Americans used transit per capita, while giving much shorter accounts of transit since the mid-20th century. To give one example, no extensive study examines San Francisco’s BART—one of the largest megaprojects of the 1960s and 1970s—from a historical perspective. Fortunately, historians are beginning to focus more attention on mass transit during the eras after World War II. Leading this trend is Zachary Schrag’s fine work on the Washington Metro, which has brought a postwar perspective to the literature on subways by Clifton Hood and other historians. 81 Public concern about environmental sustainability, alternative transportation forms and energy sources, and the consequences of an automobile-based lifestyle suggest that research on more recent transit history will continue to grow.

Primary Sources

Historians of mass transit use a variety of primary sources to understand issues related to the topic. Such breadth reflects the fact that the study of mass transit requires knowledge of both technical matters and social dynamics, since both elements are interconnected. The voices of elites—politicians, company executives, and technical experts—are often found in reports, trade publications, government records, and other official documents. Uncovering the thoughts and behaviors of ordinary people (whether they be users, observers, or workers) is more challenging but can be gleaned from newspaper reports, literature, and photographs and other forms of visual art as well as the census and other quantitative sources. Scale is a further consideration in the study of mass transit, as transit may be approached from a national to a local perspective. Depending on the research question, scale influences the types of sources used by the historian.

Historical Tables presented in the American Public Transportation Association’s (APTA) annual Public Transportation Fact Book is a good place to begin research on general statistical trends. Information dates to 1890 for some categories and draws from the census and APTA records. George Mason University is home to the American Public Transportation Association records . The collection, featuring materials related to APTA, its predecessor organizations, and the Institute for Rapid Transit, is arranged in seven thematic series from meetings and publications to local transit files. Industry trade publications are also excellent sources for understanding mass transit developments. These magazines are usually devoted to a specific transport mode or the industry more generally. A short list of publications includes: Street Railway Journal (published 1884–1908 ); Electric Railway Journal (published 1908–1931 ); Bus Transportation ; Bus World ; Motor Coach Age/Motor Coach Today (published 1950 –2003); Mass Transit ; Passenger Transport ; Metro ; Headlights ; National Railway Bulletin ; Railway Age (published 1856 –present).

Several institutions contain historical information on mass transit at a national level. The National Transportation Library of the Department of Transportation features digitized sources with an emphasis on statistical, technical, or policy documents. The collection is more useful for the study of the recent past since a majority of its documents date from the late 20th century to the present. The Transportation Research Board operates TRID , a massive search database that covers more than one billion transportation documents, including conference proceedings, technical reports, books, and journal articles related to transit. More than thirty institutions across the United States form the University Transportation Centers program. These centers often feature strong transportation libraries, such as the Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library of Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies.

Local collections—archives, museums, libraries, and other repositories—are essential for historical research on mass transit in a specific city or region. These collections often feature reports, meeting minutes, and other documents related to local transit activities. For example, the New York Transit Museum houses an extensive collection of materials related to the transit history of the New York metropolitan area. The Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library and Archive —operated by the Los Angeles Metro transit authority—caters to research devoted to Southern California’s transportation history. Since transit held a prominent place in public debates and daily life during the 19th and 20th centuries, local newspapers are also excellent sources for research on significant developments as well as more quotidian matters related to local transit history.

Further Reading

• Barrett, Paul . The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1900–1930 . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.
• Cudahy, Brian . Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America . New York: Fordham University Press, 1990.
• Hood, Clifton . 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
• Jackson, Kenneth J. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• McShane, Clay . Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City . New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Norton, Peter . Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
• Post, Robert C. Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology . Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.
• Schrag, Zachary M. The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
• Warner, Sam Bass . Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.

1. Kenneth J. Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 31, 28 .

2. Brian Cudahy , Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 60–61 .

3. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 33.

4. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 34.

5. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 8–10.

6. Glen E. Holt , “The Changing Perception of Urban Pathology: An Essay on the Development of Mass Transit in the United States,” in Cities in American History , edited by Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 325 .

7. Robert C. Post , Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 14–15 .

8. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 35.

9. Joel Tarr and Clay McShane , The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 61–62 .

10. Tarr and McShane, Horse in the City , 64–65.

11. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 13.

12. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 19, 14.

13. Tarr and McShane, Horse in the City , 63; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 39.

14. Tarr and McShane, Horse in the City , 70–71; Clay McShane , Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 14 .

15. Tarr and McShane, Horse in the City , 1, 14.

16. David E. Nye , Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 89 .

17. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 22; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 106.

18. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 14–15.

19. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 92–94.

20. Tarr and McShane, Horse in the City , 5.

21. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 64–71.

22. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 24.

23. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 27–33.

24. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 27–31.

25. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 103.

26. Nye, Electrifying America , 86.

27. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 41, 48.

28. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 108.

29. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 48.

30. Nye, Electrifying America , 90–91.

31. Robert Fogelson , Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 16 ; Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 48.

32. Fogelson, Downtown , 55–60; Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 84–87.

33. Clifton Hood , 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York . Centennial Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) .

34. Fogelson, Downtown , 20; Nye, Electrifying America , 112; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 113.

35. Sam Bass Warner Jr. , Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 22 .

36. Nye, Electrifying America , 96–97.

37. McShane, Asphalt Path , 23–25.

38. Warner, Streetcar Suburbs , 3.

39. Nye, Electrifying America , 132.

40. Clifton Hood , “Changing Perceptions of Public Space on the New York Rapid Transit System,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 3 (March 1996): 308 .

41. Nye, Electrifying America , 137.

42. Robin D. G. Kelley , “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (1993): 103 .

43. Tarr and McShane, Horse in the City , 79.

44. Blair L. M. Kelley , Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) .

45. Hood, “Changing Perceptions,” 319–321; Donald F. Davis , “North American Urban Transit, 1890–1950: What If We Thought about It as a Type of Technology?” History and Technology 12 (1995): 318–320 .

46. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 152.

47. David W. Jones , Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 33 .

48. Post, Urban Mass Transit, 67.

49. Post, Urban Mass Transit, 66–67.

50. Paul Barrett , The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1900–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 96–105 , 221.

51. Peter Norton , Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 8–11 .

52. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 69–70.

53. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 98; Post, Urban Mass Transit , 68, 83.

54. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 4.

55. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 151–153; Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 188–190.

56. 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 (January 2000): 51–79 .

57. Davis, “North American Urban Transit,” 315.

58. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 119; Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 163.

59. Sarah K. Frohardt-Lane , “Race, Public Transit, and Automobility in World War II Detroit,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 .

60. David W. Jones Jr. , Urban Transit Policy: An Economic and Political History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985), 80 .

61. Richard F. Weingroff , “Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System,” Public Roads 60.1 (Summer 1996). Available at: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/96summer/p96su10.cfm

62. Christopher Wells , Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012) .

63. Jones, Urban Transit Policy , 81, 116; Cuhady, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 221; Post, Urban Mass Transit , 135.

64. Edward Weiner , Urban Transportation Planning in the United States: An Historical Overview , rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 42–43 .

65. Jones, Urban Transit Policy , 83.

66. Peter Hall , Great Planning Disasters , (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 109–137 .

67. Zachary M. Schrag , The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) .

68. J. R. Meyer , J. F. Kain , and M. Wohl , The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965) .

69. Schrag, Great Society Subway , 3.

70. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 196.

71. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers , 196–197; Post, Urban Mass Transit , 147.

72. Schrag, Great Society Subway , 180–181.

73. Weiner, Urban Transportation , 84.

74. Weiner, Urban Transportation , 99.

75. Post, Urban Mass Transit , 5–6.

76. Sam Bass Warner , Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) .

77. Brian Cudahy , Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990) .

78. Kenneth J. Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) .

79. Clay McShane , Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) .

80. Peter Norton , Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) .

81. Zachary M. Schrag , The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) .

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The Evolution of Transportation

The evolution of transportation, just like the evolution of humankind, has gone through trials and tribulations as it has evolved through time.

It has ebbed and flowed, overcoming challenges to grow to ever-increasing levels of complexity and efficiency. Today, we often take for granted our ability to get from one place to another, nearby or distant. We expect to get there, but don’t often reflect on how, and we suppose, more than we actually know, how we move from one location to another. But throughout history, we have had to slowly but surely, painstakingly evolve our means of transportation to where it is today.

Many modes of transport have evolved and many more have gone extinct. The modes of our transportation have developed alongside the expansion of our human understanding and culture. Our greatest demands and challenges have, in turn, initiated our greatest inventive feats that have taken us from where we have come to where we intend to go. Transportation technology has been the key to our most powerful sociological and teleological growth. And as it has done so in the distant past, it will continue to do so into the distant future.

During the stone age of antiquity, we walked and ran upon the solid earth and swam and floated in dugout canoes upon the liquid rivers or seas. By 3500 BC, we began using wheeled carts and river boats. By 3100 BC, we tamed horses to assist our way. By 2000 BC, we built chariots. By 600 BC, we built wagons. By 332 BC, we built submersibles. By 312 BC, we built miles of paved roads. By 236 BC, we constructed our first elevators. By 214 BC, we built canals. By 200 BC, we constructed manned kites to fly.

During the middle ages in the 800s, we paved streets with tar.

During the 13th century, by the late 1200s, we invented sky-flying rockets.

During the 15th century, by the later 1400s, we built advanced sailing ships to cross entire oceans.

During the 16th century, we began using horse-powered rails of wood and stone.

During the 17th century, by 1620, we launched the first oar-propelled submarine. By 1662, we invented the horse-drawn bus. By 1672, we built the first steam-powered car.

During the 18th century, by 1740, we invented the foot-and-hand-powered carriage. By 1769, we experimented with the steam-driven artillery tractor. By 1760, we used iron rails. By 1776, we propelled submarines by screws. By 1783, we launched the first hot air and hydrogen balloons. By 1784, we built a steam carriage.

During the 19th century, by 1801, we ran steam road locomotives. By 1803, we ran commercial steam carriages and steamboats. By 1804, we built steam-powered railway locomotives and amphibious vehicles. By 1807, we used hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines in boats and road vehicles. By 1816, we invented bicycles. By 1820, we used steam locomotives on rails. By 1821, we used steam-powered monorails. By 1825, we began using steam-powered passenger carriages. By 1838, we built the first transatlantic steamship. By 1852, we invented the elevator. By 1853, we built aircraft gliders. By 1862, we made gasoline engine automobiles. By 1867, we began using motorcycles. By 1880, we built electric elevators. By 1896, we built electric escalators. By 1897, we had the steam turbine and electric bicycle.

During the 20th century, by 1900, we built airships. By 1903, we flew motor-driven airplanes and sailed in diesel engine canal boats. By 1908, we drove gas engine automobiles. By 1911, we launched diesel engine driven ships. By 1912, we launched liquid-fueled rockets. By 1935, we built DC-3 transport aircrafts. By 1939, we built jet engine-powered aircrafts. By 1942, we launched V2 rockets. By 1947, we had supersonic manned flights. By 1955, we had nuclear-powered submarines. By 1957, we launched a man made satellite into orbit — Sputnik 1, built container ships and flew commercial Boeing 707s. By 1961, we launched the first manned space mission orbiting the Earth. By 1969, we flew Boeing 747 wide body airliners and made the first manned moon landing — Apollo 11. By 1971, we launched the first space station. By 1976, we flew the supersonic concord passenger jet. By 1981, we flew the Space Shuttle. By 1994, the channel tunnel opened.

During the 21st century, by 2001, we launched the first self-balancing personal transport. By 2004, we operated commercial high-speed Maglev trains and launched the first suborbital space flight — SpaceShipOne. By 2012, we have now probed and viewed beyond the edge of our solar system with Voyager 1 spacecraft.

So, where do the remainder years of this century and the future of transportation now take us? Back to the moon, to Mars, or to Jupiter and beyond? Will we continue on our pioneering quest for those proximal and then most distant planets and stars that at present we have only a dim apprehension of? Will we probe the greatest depths and heights of the Earth and exceed the greatest speeds and teleport the holographic particle forms of our most creative imaginations? Will there be an end to our inventive and transportation horizons? Or will we continue to go where no man or woman has ever dared to go before and beyond?

It is our nature to explore, encompass and conquer the world and the many potential worlds we now appear to know. Our anthropology demonstrates this ever-expanding quest for awareness and influence. The history of our evolving transportation and the mystery of its future will be in our hands, hearts and minds. The only limits to our creative and inventive endeavors will be those we self-impose and those of the misunderstanding of our constraining and possibly liberating laws of the universe. May we step out onto the diving board of life and take the next quantum leap into the inspiring and inventive frontiers of the transportation minds of the future. May we let no boundary stop us from our ultimate destiny to reach for the stars. May our compelling desire to know the universe lead us onward and outward to those new and broader transportation horizons of tomorrow. Wow, what an inspiring reflection upon from where we have come and to where we will go.

Transportation, Travel, and Tourism Evolution

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The transportation, travel, and tourism sector—abbreviated in this chapter to 3T—is making a subtle but dramatic shift. The industry led the way into the digital age with e-tourism , the use of digital media to assist with every transaction in the 3T value chain. E-tourism allows travelers to seek, find, and procure experiences with a few keystrokes or clicks. Now, the industry is undergoing another transformation with smart tourism , offering not only an array of options via digital media but also making personalized suggestions and even guiding the consumer’s choices.

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• Introduction To Motion
• Transportation History

History of Transportation

Introduction.

The history of transportation begins from the human era and continued to change over a period of time. The first means of transportation was the human foot. People used to walk large distances to reach places. The first improvement made to this kind of transportation was adapting to different surfaces. For example, people living in areas with snow and ice wore spike-like attachments so that they didn’t slip on the ground.

People knew that trees and logs float on water and so they dug out the middle portion of logs to form a kind of seating. This helped people use water bodies as a means of transport.

Watch the video and learn about the history of transportation

Around 3500 BC, the first wheeled vehicles were used. As a means of transporting small loads, wheels were attached to carts and chariots. Around the same time constituting to transportation history, people developed simple logs into controllable riverboats with oars to direct the vehicle.

From here people went on to tame animals like horses as a means of transportation. Domesticating animals to use them as a means of transporting people and small goods then started following a trend.

Change in Transportation History with the Discovery of Wheel

Transportation history took a drastic change with the introduction of wheels. Because of the discovery of the wheel and axle other smaller devices like wheelbarrows came into use. Existing means of transportation were continuously improved thereafter. For example, the use of iron horseshoes became a common practice. Clubbing different modes of transportation was then a possibility. For example, horse-drawn vehicles (carts or carriages).

From here, the progress related to transportation started gaining large momentum. Submarines came into existence around 1620 and in the 1660s properly functioning modes of public transportation were available. Carriages, steamboats, cycles and even hot air balloons became functioning vehicles which were used on a large scale.

The first gas engine vehicle was made by Jean Lenoir in the year 1862 and after this, in the year 1867, the first motorcycle was invented. Finally, in the year 1903, the Wright brothers designed the first manned aeroplane with an engine. In the year 1926, the first liquid propelled rocket was launched successfully! Other vehicles like the helicopter, jets and hovercrafts came after this.

Existing means of transport were continuously being improved upon. The steam engines lead to the invention of bullet trains. The manned flight created by the Wright brothers lead to a Jumbo Jet! From travelling on foot we have come a long way and different means of travelling have to lead to a vast network. The types of transportation in existence now are given below.

• Land Transport
• Water Transport
• Air Transport or Aviation
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Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs

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• History of Transportation

Transportation

The history of transport is said to largely be one of technological innovation. The advances in technology have allowed people to travel farther distances and explore more territory. Along with that, people can expand their influence over larger and larger areas as well. 

Even in ancient times, there were new tools such as foot coverings, skis and snowshoes that lengthened the distances that could be travelled from one place to another. Here, we are going to discover some more information about transportation. 

Innovation generally continues as transport researchers are working to find different and some new ways to reduce costs and increase transport efficiency.

Evolution of Transportation

  (Image will be uploaded soon)              

The history of transportation generally begins from the human era and continues to change over a period of time. The first means of transportation was the foot of human beings. People used to walk very large distances to reach places earlier. The first improvement that was made to this kind of transportation was adapting to different surfaces as well. For example, we can say that the people who are living in areas with snow and ice, wore spike-like attachments which were there so that they didn’t slip on the ground.

There are people who knew that the logs and the trees float on water and so they dug out the portion that is in the middle of logs to form a kind of seating. This helped people a lot and allowed for water bodies to be used as a means of transport.

It was around 3500 BC that the first vehicle wheels were used. As a means of transporting the loads which were too small, the wheels were attached to carts and chariots. From here people usually went on to tame animals like horses and all as a means of transportation. The animals which are domesticated were used as means of transporting people and small goods.

International trade was the driving motivator behind advancements in global transportation in the Pre Modern world. Then there was a single global world of the economy with a worldwide division of labour and multilateral trade from 1500 onward. The transportation and the sale of textile, silver and gold and spices, slaves and luxury goods throughout Afro-Eurasia and later the New World saw an evolution in overland and sea trade routes.

Introduction of Transport

The history of transportation has taken a very drastic change with the introduction of wheels. This is because of the discovery of the axel and the wheel in other smaller devices like wheelbarrows that came into use. The existing means of transportation were continuously improved thereafter. For example, we can say that the use of iron horseshoes became a common practice. The clubbing of different modes of transportation was then a possibility if we look at it keenly. For example, horse-drawn vehicles as cars or carriages.

From here we see the progress which is related to transportation that started gaining large momentum. The submarines came into existence around 1620 and in the 1660s mode of properly functioning public transportation were available. The carriages and the steamboats, along with the cycles and even hot air balloons became functioning vehicles that were used on a large scale.

The vehicle that was the first gas engine was made by Jean Lenoir in the year 1862 and after this in the year 1867 that is the first motorcycle was invented. Finally, in the year 1903, the Wright brothers designed the first manned aeroplane with an engine. In 1926, there was the first liquid rocket propellant launched successfully! Other vehicles like the helicopter, jets and hovercrafts came after this.

Existing means of transport were said to be continuously being improved upon. The steam engines generally lead to the invention of bullet trains as well. The flight that was manned which was created by the Wright brothers led to a Jumbo Jet! From travelling on foot we have come a long way and different means of travelling have led to a vast network in the external world.

History of Transportation In India

The transport in India generally consists of transport by land, and water and air. Public transport is said to be the primary mode of road transport for most Indian citizens, and India's public transport systems as well are among the most heavily used in the world.

The network of India's roads is the second-largest and one of the busiest ones in the world. The transporting passengers were 8.225 billion and over 980 million tonnes of cargo was transported annually as of 2015. Indian aviation is broadly divided into military and civil aviation which is the fastest-growing market aviation in the world as per IATA data and Bangalore with a 65% national share is the largest aviation manufacturing hub of India. 

History of transportation has undergone drastic changes when humans invented the wheels. This was only because of the discovery of the wheel and axle in the smaller devices like the wheelbarrow which were in use. The transportation that was already present was vigorously improved overtime. We can consider the example of the iron horse-shoes which came into practice. Clubbing of transportation modes was a possibility where humans looked keenly. For example, the horse carts and carriages that were in use.  Eventually, the transportation area started gaining momentum largely. The submarines were invented and came into use around the year of 1620 and in the 1660s, the public transportation means were available. The carriages and steamboats were already present and thus came the cycles and even hot air balloons. All of these came in function and were used on a large scale.

Jean Lenoir in 1862 contributed to the invention of the first gas engine in a vehicle. Later, in the year 1867, the first motorcycle was also invented. We all must have heard about the Wright brothers. They made the airplane in 1903 and it was one of the greatest human inventions. Then in 1926, the first liquid rocket propellant was also launched successfully. And gradually, the jets, helicopter and hovercrafts also came into use.  This led to many improvements of all the existing transportation. The steam engines that were in use eventually led to the discovery of bullet trains that we see around us. The airplane which was invented by the Wright brothers then led to the invention of the Jumbo jet. This made travelling around the world easier and convenient. In the past, it took months to travel long distances which can now be covered in some hours or days.

FAQs on History of Transportation

1. Explain What the History of Transport is ?

Before every other form of transportation there were humans who travelled on foot. Initially, a canoe-like structure was used for water transportation. This was built by burning logs and digging out the burned wood. In 3100BC there was the sailing boat which was invented by Egyptians while the Romans built roads across the country of Europe.

2. When Did Transportation Start in India?

The railway of Mumbai Suburban is the first rail system in India which began services in Mumbai in 1853 and the transports had 6.3 million passengers daily and has the passengers with the highest density in the world. The railway of Kolkata Suburban was established in Kolkata in 1854.

3. What Was the First Public Transportation?

The first form of public transport was multiple people riding animals. The animal-drawn ferries are thought to be the earliest form of public transit. The wheel was invented in 3,500 BC but it wasn't until 1,600 BC that it was used for a chariot as well. This is when the idea of travel for longer travel was possible by road.

4. What are the means of transportation?

Means of transportation can be defined as the transport facilities which are used for moving goods or people from one location to many other locations. This term ‘means of transportation’ can be interchanged with the usage of the term ‘mode of transport’. These means of transportation can be the transportation means that are used in water forms, landforms and even air forms. Examples of these transportation means are : ship, car, airplane etc. 

Such means have made travelling and import/export of goods easier and accessible. 

5. Why do we need transportation?

here are plenty of reasons why transportation is important. They are as follows:

Transportation enables commerce, trade and most importantly communication which are a crucial part in today’s rapid urbanization. Here, the traffic flows without being disturbed and moves at a steady phase from one location to another location.

It acts as a link between the manufacturing industries and the consumer industries. Without it, there won’t be import and export of essential goods across states, countries and even continents. It has become an important time of our life. 

Transportation has played a major role in the development of all the nations across the planet. It is an indicator of civilization in the world. If the current transportation wouldn’t have existed then there wouldn’t have been any development. 

6. What does air transport mean?

Transport means occur in land forms, air forms and water forms. Air transport is the transportation that occurs in the air. An aircraft or an airplane is a heavy flying vehicle which is designed properly so as to carry lift and carry the vehicle as a whole. There are wide ranges of aircrafts which are used for domestic purposes as well as for military purposes. For travelling shorter distances or places where there are no runways, helicopters are operated and used. Other air transportation means are airships and autogyros. This means of transport is considered the fastest mode of transportation. Commercial jets are quite fast and travel a distance covering 955 kilometres per hour and at a considerable higher ground speed. However, they require high energy use and are quite expensive. Aviation has many impacts on the environment which is a growing concern for the environment. 

7. What is rail transport?

Rail transport is a means of land transport. It is convenient for travelling passengers and carrying goods. It is a wheeled vehicle that runs on a track called the railway track or railroad or railway. The rails are connected perpendicularly to the railway. This consists of more than one connected vehicle which runs on it. The propulsion is provided by something called a locomotive which powers the rails and then carries freight or passengers. This is powered by steam, electricity or diesel which is supplied by systems. Some other rails are powered by multiple units. Other sources of power are cables, gravity, gas turbines and pneumatics. The railways are very efficient means of transportation however, less efficient when compared to ships.

8. Can I get notes on the topic of transportation on Vedantu?

yes, you can get notes on the topic of transportation. You have to log in or sign-up to any of the Vedantu platforms, that is, the Vedantu website or app. You can then simply download the study materials you require. They are given in a PDF file which has been prepared by our subject experts and they have made sure to add the important points that will help you understand the concepts better and get good scores in the examinations. This is free of cost and you can start learning simply by logging in to Vedantu.

The Evolution of Transportation in the Philippines: A History

• January 12, 2023
• Tourism Blog , Transportation

The Philippines has seen tremendous changes in transportation over the centuries. From bicycles and carriages to jeepneys, buses, and trains, the ways Filipinos move from place to place have evolved significantly throughout history.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the rich history of transportation in the Philippines, covering everything from ancient modes of transport to modern-day innovations. From the introduction of the jeepney to the development of the Philippines’ first train system, here’s a look at how transportation has evolved in the country over time.

Pre-colonial Transportation: Native Modes of Travel

Before the arrival of foreign colonizers, the Philippines had a well-developed transportation system that was primarily based on the use of water and land.

The most commonly used mode of transportation for the indigenous population was the “ banwa ,” a small boat used for fishing and traveling between islands. The “ paraw ” was another common boat used for transportation, particularly for trade and commerce.

On land, the ancient Filipinos used the “ karit ” (a horse-drawn cart) and the “sakayan” (a horse-drawn carriage) for transportation. They also used the “ kalanduyan ,” a type of long-distance foot travel, to travel between villages and towns.

The indigenous population also used the “ taklong ,” a type of raft made of bamboo, to transport goods such as rice and other crops across rivers and other bodies of water.

Overall, pre-colonial transportation in the Philippines was primarily based on the use of water and land, with a reliance on human and animal power. These modes of transportation were essential to the daily lives of the indigenous population, allowing them to travel for trade, commerce, and other activities.

Colonial Era Transportation: The Introduction of Modern Methods

With the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in the Philippines in the 16th century, the transportation system in the archipelago underwent significant changes. The Spanish introduced new modes of transportation, such as the galleon ships, which were used for trade and commerce between the Philippines and other Spanish colonies.

They also built roads and bridges to connect the different regions of the Philippines, making it easier for them to travel and transport goods.

During the American colonial period, the transportation infrastructure in the Philippines was further developed. The Americans introduced new forms of transportation, such as trains and automobiles, which greatly improved travel and commerce. They also built airports and ports, which allowed for more efficient transportation of goods and people.

The introduction of modern methods of transportation during the colonial era greatly improved the transportation system in the Philippines, making it easier for people to travel and transport goods. It also played a key role in the development of trade and commerce in the archipelago.

However, it also had a negative impact on the indigenous population, who were forced to adapt to the new forms of transportation imposed by the colonizers.

Transportation in the Philippines during World War II

The transportation infrastructure of the Philippines during World War II was severely damaged due to the Japanese bombing. The majority of roads and bridges were destroyed, making it difficult for the Philippine people to travel between cities.

During World War II, the transportation system in the Philippines was greatly affected by the war. The bombing and fighting resulted in severe damage to the infrastructure and limited the use of trains, automobiles, and ships. The reliance on these forms of transportation decreased and people were forced to use bicycles and walking as their primary means of transportation.

After the war, the transportation infrastructure was rebuilt and reconstructed, new forms of transportation were introduced such as buses and jeepneys, and the transportation system slowly returned to its pre-war state. However, jeepneys and the use of bicycles remained popular means of transportation.

Post-war Transportation: Rapid Developments and Modernization

The aftermath of World War II had a major impact on transportation around the world. With the help of technological and engineering advancements, transport systems were modernized, allowing for faster and more efficient methods of travel. Post-war transportation experienced rapid developments and saw the introduction of new technologies that revolutionized global transportation networks.

These developments made it possible to transport goods, services, and people faster than ever before. Below is the lists of the development in the Philippines transport:

• The Philippines experienced rapid economic growth following World War II, which led to increased investment in transportation infrastructure.
• The government built new highways and bridges, which greatly improved the country’s road network.
• The introduction of new forms of transportation such as buses, jeepneys, and tricycles, which are widely used for public transportation in urban areas.
• The establishment of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) and the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) systems in Metro Manila, improved transportation in the capital region.
• The development of airports and seaports greatly improved the transportation of goods and people.
• The use of cars and motorcycles also grew in popularity, leading to an increase in the number of vehicles on the road and the need for improved traffic management.
• The Philippines also experienced a significant increase in air travel, with the growth of airlines and the expansion of airports.

Overall, the post-war period in the Philippines saw rapid developments and modernization in transportation. The country’s transportation infrastructure was greatly improved, and new forms of transportation were introduced to meet the needs of a growing population.

his led to increased mobility and improved connectivity, which played a key role in the country’s economic growth. However, with the growth in the number of vehicles on the road, traffic congestion has become an increasingly significant issue in urban areas.

Contemporary Transportation: Current Challenges and Future Developments

The evolution of transportation in the Philippines is an ongoing cycle of changes that have kept up with the times. As the nation moves forward and its population grows, it has become increasingly necessary to develop solutions or modify existing solutions to address current challenges. The public transportation system is currently trying to keep up with:

The table illustrates the current challenges and future developments in transportation in the Philippines. The country is currently facing a number of challenges in transportation, including traffic congestion, air pollution, and the need to meet the growing demand for transportation.

The government is working on various initiatives to address these challenges and improve the transportation system in the country. These include building new infrastructure such as highways, bridges, and mass transit systems, promoting the use of public transportation and non-motorized transport, and exploring alternative fuel vehicles (electric and hybrid) and water transportation.

The development of smart cities with integrated transportation management technology is also being considered as a way to improve mobility and reduce traffic congestion in the future.

In conclusion

The history of transportation in the Philippines has been a long and varied one. From pre-colonial modes of transport to modern-day innovations, transportation has seen significant changes throughout the years. However, with increasing population growth and urbanization, there is still much work to be done in order to improve the country’s transportation infrastructure.

The government and the private sector are working together to address current challenges and explore future developments, such as smart cities and alternative fuel vehicles. Transportation in the Philippines has come a long way, but there is still much to be done to ensure its continued success.

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