3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

What is more American than the car? Road trips along desert scenes, lonesome gas stations, roadside diners and motels, massive highway interchange ramps in Los Angeles, teenagers coming of age while exploring the suburbs in their first car—these are the images we tend to associate with the American gospel of liberty, individualism, and prosperity. Simultaneously, for many Americans, cars, car culture, and automotive infrastructures evoke more negative images—of environmental and noise pollution, of congested streets, and of urban sprawl. In cities throughout America, disruptive road construction projects have had a highly disproportionate impact on lower-income communities and communities of color. Moreover, many would argue that Americans’ reliance on cars has resulted in substandard public transportation systems across the nation. Throughout the twentieth century—and especially since the 1960s—critics of car-centric planning have advocated for more investment in public transportation. More broadly, transportation planning has consistently been among the most contentious policy fields, generating fierce political battles in which Americans were forced to confront profound political questions—about the proper role of the federal government, about the environment, about (historic) architecture, about traffic safety, and about race, class, and gender. This course traces chronologically how the balance between cars and transit was negotiated as the twentieth century unfolded. We will use different historical approaches—political history, social and labor history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and cultural history—giving us a broad array of perspectives to analyze the history of private and public passenger transportation in America. Throughout the course, we will put historical evidence in dialogue with current debates about transportation planning, encouraging us to imagine a more just and sustainable transportation future.