The Impact of New Transport Technologies on Intraurban Mobility: A View from the Past

Abstract

In this paper the authors reappraise the ways in which travellers in urban areas have interacted with new transport technologies and argue that mobility change over the past century or so may be less than is sometimes assumed. Attention is focused on changes in the journey to work over the 20th century, on the experience of new travel technologies by an adolescent female in the late 19th century, on perceptions of competing forms of urban transport in Manchester and Glasgow in the interwar period, and on changes in the everyday mobility of children aged 10–11 years since the 1940s. It is argued that, although the material experience of everyday transport has changed significantly over the past century with the advent of new transport technologies, these did not necessarily change the aspirations and decisions of people with regard to everyday mobility. Moreover, such changes did not always bring benefits to all travellers.