Mass Motorization examines the rise of automobility and the decline of mass transit in the United States as parallel, but not always interdependent, developments. First and foremost David Jones denies the hypothesis current among policy specialists that the construction of urban freeways ruined mass transit. Transit was in serious financial and managerial difficulties before the construction of urban freeways. Ridership, perceived as travel primarily on urban streetcars, but also on subways and buses, peaked in 1926, at which time automobile travel had become a serious challenge. Already in 1925 the United States had crossed the threshold of initial motorization – defined as 150 cars and trucks per 1,000 population. The American love affair with the automobile continued to grow – notwithstanding the depression and unemployment of the 1930s. The nation attained the next stage of motorization, namely mass motorization, or 400 vehicles per 1,000 population, in 1958. Most of the build-up to this status took place between 1946 and 1952, prior to the federal funding of the interstate highway programme in 1956. By 1980 the United States had reached the stage of pervasive motorization when its combined car and truck ownership rate stood at 685 per 1,000 population and less than ten per cent of the labour force walked to work or commuted by public transport.

Mass motorization is related to the decline of mass transit, but the displacement of the latter must be seen in its correct historical context. Though the United States led the world in the electric transit era, problems were already emerging before the First World War. Historians are more familiar with the attempts of Progressive governments to monitor corruption by the utility and transit companies. This book concentrates on the financial issues of capital investment. The inflationary years of the war created demands for higher wages. Lack of available investment capital and the flat nickel fare impeded modernization. Though fares were increased following state regulation the street railways remained unable to attract adequate finance and only those metropolitan cities with a large enough population to support rapid transit were effective in partially deflecting motorization. Even after the conversion of local transit to public ownership in the 1960s, only stabilization at relatively low levels of between thirty and thirty-six rides per capita were achieved. Then too much attention was paid to improving commuter rail services. Any feasible renewal of urban transit, whether by light rail or motor buses, will depend on flexible arrangements which respond to local needs. These arrangements will require not only federal investment, but also new labour contracts and multi-modal transport partnerships. There is no uniform solution for urban transit.

The arrangements will also require changes to automobiles, if not to high levels of auto-dependence. Here European readers and transatlantic historians of the United States may be less persuaded by David Jones's arguments. Not only mass motorization, but also pervasive motorization and probably higher levels of car ownership are considered to be a way of life. Certainly the spatial dimensions of suburban housing after the Second World War created an auto-dependency because they were inhospitable both to walking and to transit use. Designed so that roads did not encourage through traffic, they also necessitated not only one car per household, but two cars, one for the wage-earner and one for the housewife who otherwise would be stranded in suburbia. Once the housewife in turn became gainfully employed, frequently at the office park, industrial park or shopping centre located at the intersection of metropolitan freeways, the two-car suburban family became a norm. More recently three cars – one now for the licensed teenager – have become desirable. Interstate highways facilitated the higher levels of car ownership, but these would not have occurred without postwar economic growth, increasing gross domestic product per capita and the rising expectations of the middle class. There is a viable logic to this viewpoint and David Jones does raise the chicken-and-egg question about which came first – higher incomes, automobility or suburbanization.

What David Jones is hypothesizing is automobile exceptionalism. Set in a global context of the G7 countries, other first-world nations and rapidly growing economies, the United States certainly looks different. European countries' greater proclivity for public transit can be explained in terms of their older and more compact urban centres and their relatively late conversion to automobility. The potential motorization of China, India and Russia lies in the future. But by now much of the world is attuned to the problems of CO₂ emissions and global warming. The author's solution to moderating the high levels of American greenhouse gases is a relatively small fuel surcharge and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles which eliminate tailpipe emissions. Though these may not be economically feasible for some fifteen or twenty years they offer potentially more robust solutions than electric vehicles, whether all-electrics or hybrids. They also suggest an answer to the volatility of oil prices which has contributed to the competitive difficulties of American automakers. The “Detroit Three” in part lost their postwar dominance because they failed to appreciate the value of small vehicles after the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and because they focussed on production rather than on vehicle technology. They then made more trucks and SUVs when oil prices stabilized. Now they are in dire straights.

This is a valuable and topical book which brings transport issues to the fore in American domestic and foreign policy. It is also a frustrating volume. It is much more a policy analysis than a history tome. Written by a social scientist who was research manager at the Institute of Transportation, University of California–Berkeley and has been a staff consultant to regional transport planning agencies in the San Francisco Bay area, it has a tendency to list in bullet points and to repeat its major arguments. It also examines the present and looks to the future. Herein it tends to be influenced by planners, economists, urban policy specialists and engineers rather than by historians. Perhaps historians have been reluctant to engage with transport issues. What this book suggests is that historians need to examine modern spatial mobility rather than take it as a given American characteristic.