Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City by Clay McShane

Abstract

420 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The argument that dominance of the bus over the train for passenger travel in California was not a technological, demographic, or political inevitability but a result of good and bad management choices is one that some will nitpick about in detail, but none will be able to deny totally in the face of this book. Railroad passenger service failed in a time of prosperity when it could have and should have succeeded. Thompson’s chapter “What Went Wrong” has applications far be­ yond his specific case. Craig Miner Dr. Miner is professor of history at Wichita State University. Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City. By Clay McShane. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Pp. xvii + 288; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $29.50. Clay McShane’s book is a most welcome addition to the dis­ gracefully thin shelf of literature on the history of American roads. McShane concentrates on urban roads of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is quite reasonable given the limited market for good roads outside cities in an era dominated by steamboats, steamships, and railroads for long-distance travel and by street railways for urban travel. He couches his principal argument as that between the rights of abutters, whose property abutted the street and who wished to use the street for recreation and commerce, and commuters, whose interest lay in the right of passage, preferably speedy. Abutters, McShane notes, had the best of it through to the late 1800s, not least because urban roads were paved only by property taxes agreed to by abutters and through a localized political system. Since the city then had to maintain the streets so constructed, the abutters’ interests were best served by cheap construction. Such a system effectively mini­ mized through traffic. McShane examines the various attempts at automobility before the triumph of the internal-combustion engine early in this century. While recognizing most of the manifest technical problems of steam automobility, he correctly notes that it was lack of both suitable travel surfaces and systems of finance favoring commuters that doomed steam power through most of the 1800s. He suggests that competitive steam vehicles were in the offing by late century, a view I cannot fully accept: condensers and flash boilers, without which they were too thirsty for water and too slow to start, made steamers complex, and they were doomed by the second law of thermodynamics to lose a fight with much more thermally efficient internal-combustion engines. Much of McShane’s discussion here is placed in two very proper contexts. First is the urgent need to replace the horse because of its TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 421 slowness, unreliability, short working life, susceptibility to disease, and the health hazard to city residents posed by its droppings. Second is the spatial incompetence of street railways. Although even horse trolleys were efficient because they could pull heavy loads over metal rails, such systems provided only radial transit in and out of city centers. The result was spatial concentration downtown, increasing déconcentration away from the city center, few crosstown linkages, and poor freight transport. As a geographer I am very pleased to see McShane consider this second context, but I believe it needs still greater emphasis. Toward the end of the century, a spatially deconcentrated city began to develop as people became more comfortable with higher speeds in the streets because of trolleys and as bicycling developed. I am glad to see McShane give the latter its due since it is even less frequently written about by academics than the road. In the political sphere, decisions about roads in the late 1800s moved away from local to citywide and professional control, which allowed commuters to triumph over abutters. Thus was the stage set for the triumph of the automobile. Although it is not a central part of his argument, McShane offers us an interesting chapter on gender, evaluating why males came to dominate automobility in its early years (the standard Freudian inter­ pretation) and why females connived in this (increased freedom from parental control of sexuality). If he underestimates the female capac­ ity for driving aggressively, it is...